Confessions of a convert

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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CONFESSIONS

of

A CONVERT

BY

ROBERT HUGH BENSON

NEW IMPRESSION

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO,

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA

1913

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

DEDICATED TO

FATHER REGINALD BUCKLER, O.P.

WHOSE HAND UNLOCKED FOR ME THE GATE OF THE
CITY OF GOD AND LED ME IN

PREFACE

THE following chapters were first published, in
substance, in the American Catholic magazine, the
"Ave Maria," in 1906-1907, and it is by the kind
permission of the Editor, Father Hudson, that they
are now reprinted, with a few additions and correc
tions.

During the time that has elapsed since their
serial appearance, the writer has received a very
large number of applications that they should be
issued in book form; and after long hesitation, he
has acceded to these requests. He hesitated partly
because it appeared to him really doubtful whether
their issue would be of any real service at all, partly
because he occasionally contemplated adding con
siderably to them, and annexing to them further
"confessions of a convert" since his conversion.
This latter idea, however, he has abandoned for
the present, owing to the extraordinary difficulty he
has found in drawing any real comparisons between
the rapidly fading impression of Anglicanism upon
his memory, and the continually deepening experi-

viii PREFACE

ences of the Catholic religion. Cardinal Newman
compares, somewhere, the sensations of a convert
from Anglicanism to those of a man in a fairy story,
who, after wandering all night in a city of enchant
ment, turns after sunrise to look back upon it, and
finds to his astonishment that the buildings are no
longer there; they have gone up like wraiths and
mists under the light of the risen day. So the pres
ent writer has found. He no longer, as in the first
months of his conversion, is capable of comparing
the two systems of belief together, since that which
he has left appears to him no longer a coherent
system at all. There are, of course, associations,
memories, and emotions still left in his mind —
some of them very sacred and dear to his heart;
he still is happy in numbering among his friends
many persons who still find amongst those associa
tions and memories a system which they believe to
be the religion instituted by Jesus Christ; yet he
himself can no longer see in them anything more
than hints and fragments and aspirations detached
from their centre and reconstructed into a purely
human edifice without foundation or solidity. Yet
he is conscious of no bitterness at all — at the worst
he experiences sometimes a touch of impatience
merely at the thought of having been delayed so

PREFACE ix

long by shadows from the possession of divine
substance. He cannot, however, with justice, com
pare the two systems at all; one cannot, adequately,
compare a dream with a reality. He has abandoned,
therefore, the attempt — which lack of leisure in
any case would make practically useless — to place
side by side with his drowsy memories of Anglicanism
the story of his vivid adventures under the sunlight
of Eternal Truth. And he publishes the history of
that long-drawn process whereby he passed from
the one to the other, purely on the advice of numer
ous friends and inquirers. He is conscious of the
appalling egotism of such pages as these; yet he
has still to learn how an autobiography can be
written without it.

ROBERT HUGH BENSON
EDINBURGH, November, 1912.

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

WHEN one stands at last upon high ground, it is
extraordinarily difficult to trace the road behind
by which one has approached: it winds, rises, falls,
broadens, and narrows, until the mind is bewildered.
Nor indeed do the comments of friends and critics
shouted from below tend to clear the situation.

§i. I have been told that I became a Catholic
because I was dispirited at failure and because I
was elated at success; because I was imaginative
and because I was unperceptive; because I was not
hopeful enough and because I was too hopeful, faith
less and too trusting, too ardent and too despair
ing, proud and pusillanimous. I have even been
told, since the first publication of these papers, that
I have never truly understood the Church of Eng
land. Of course that is possible; but, if so, it is
certainly not for lack of opportunity. I was
brought up, as will be seen presently, in an ecclesias
tical household for twenty-five years; I was a
clergyman for nine years, in town and country and
a Religious House. My father was the spiritual

4 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

head of the Anglican communion; my mother,
brothers, and sister are still members of it, as well
as a large number of my friends. I was prepared
for orders by the most eminent Evangelical of his
day. I ended by becoming a convinced High
Churchman. It seems, further, now that I have my
pen in my hand, that I never before really attempted
to disentangle the strands, and that it is rash of
me to attempt it now. It is full of danger. It is
extremely easy to deceive oneself, and it is extremely
hard not to be self-conscious and complacent, not
to see only what one would wish to see; and, above
everything, one is afraid that, after all, it is bound
to be very unconvincing to other people. For
you cannot trace the guidance of the Spirit of
God or diagnose His operations in the secret rooms
of the soul: He seems at times to let good go and
to bring instead good out of evil, and light into
voluntary darkness. . . .

At the best, therefore, all that is possible is to
describe the external features of the country through
which the soul has passed — the crossroads, the
obstacles, the ravines — and to give some sort of
account of the consultations held by the way.
Faith, after all, is a divine operation wrought in the
dark, even though it may seem to be embodied in

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 5

intellectual arguments and historical facts; for it
is necessary to remember that two equally sincere
and intelligent souls may encounter the same ex
ternal evidences and draw mutually exclusive con
clusions from them. The real heart of the matter
lies somewhere else. . . . Catechumens, therefore,
must remember that while on the one side they
must of course clear the ground by the action of the
intellect, on the other side it is far more vital that
they should pray, purify motives, and yield them
selves to God.

§ 2. First, I think, it will be as well to describe,
so far as is possible, my original religious education
and position.

I was brought up in the moderate High Church
school of thought, and naturally accepted that
position as the one most truly representative of the
Anglican communion. I learned — that is to say,
so far as I could understand them — the tenets of
the Caroline divines; I was taught to be reverent,
sober-minded, anti-Roman; to believe in the Real
Presence without denning it; to appreciate state-
liness, dignity, and beauty in worship; to study first
the Bible in general and later the Greek Testament.
It seems to me, if I may say it without impertinence,
that my religious education was excellently wise.

6 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

I was interested in religion; I worshipped in dig
nified cathedrals and churches; I was allowed to
go out before the sermon; I was told the stories of
Dr. Neale and the allegories of Dr. Wilberforce and
the histories of the early Christian martyrs; and
the virtues held up to me as the most admirable
were those of truthfulness, courage, honour, obedi
ence, and reverence. I do not think that I loved
God consciously, but at least I was never frightened
at the presentation of Him or terrified by the threat
of hell. I think I accepted Him quite unemotion
ally as a universal Parental Presence and Authority.
The Person of Our Lord I apprehended more from
the Gospels than from spiritual experience; I thought
of Him in the past and the future tenses, seldom in
the present.

My father's influence upon me was always so
great that I despair of describing it. I do not
think that he understood me very well; but his
personality was so dominant and insistent that
the lack of this understanding made very little
difference; he formed and moulded my views on
religious matters in such a manner that it would
have seemed to me, while he lived, a kind of blas
phemy to have held other opinions than his. Certain
points in his system of belief puzzled me then, and

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 7

they puzzle me still; yet these no more produced
in my mind any serious question as to the soundness
and truth of his faith than intellectual difficulties
in God's Revelation produce doubts in my mind
at the present time. He was, in the main, a High
Churchman of the old school; he had an intense love
of dignity and splendour in divine worship, a great
sense of Church authority, and a firm orthodoxy
with regard to the main foundations of the Christian
Creed. Yet while he would say, partly humorously,
yet with a great deal of seriousness too, that he
ought really to have been a canon in a French
cathedral, while he would recite scrupulously every
day the morning and evening prayer of the Church
of England, while he had an intense love of Church
history and a deep knowledge both of that and of
Christian liturgies and the writings of the Fathers,
yet, in quite unexpected points he would fail, as it
seemed to me, in carrying out his principles. For
example, there is no custom more deeply rooted in
antiquity or more explicitly enjoined in the Book of
Common Prayer than that of the Friday fast; there
is scarcely any ecclesiastical discipline more primitive
than that which forbids the marriage of a man who
has already received Major Orders; there is nothing
more clear, I should have thought, among the dis-

8 CONFESSIONS OF "A CONVERT

puted questions of matrimony, than that the release
of one partner, with leave to marry again, simul
taneously releases the other partner from the bond.
Yet I am still wholly unable to understand, re
membering his enthusiastic love of what I may call
Church principles, how my father justified — as I
am convinced he did justify — his attitude to those
three points, for I never remember his abstaining
from meat on a Friday or any other day, though I
know that he denied himself instead in other ways;
he raised no objections, except on purely private
grounds, to Anglican clergy or bishops contracting
marriage; and he held, I know, that while the
guilty party, when a divorce had been pronounced
by the law of the land, must not seek the blessing
of the Church upon a subsequent union, the "inno
cent party " was perfectly at liberty to do so. Again,
I neVer understood, and do not understand now,
how my father interpreted the words "I believe in
the Holy Catholic Church." He would rule out,
I know, from external unity those bodies of Christians
that do not even claim to possess episcopal succes
sion; he hesitated, as I shall relate presently, as
to whether or no the Church of Rome had forfeited,
through her profession of what he believed to be
heretical doctrines, her place in the body of Christ;

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 9

yet he showed the greatest sympathy with and care
for certain groups of Eastern Christians whose
tenets have been explicitly condemned by Councils
which he himself would acknowledge as ecumenical.
Again, I have never really understood his attitude
towards such doctrines as those of the Sacrament
of Penance. He held firmly in theory that Jesus
Christ has given authority to His ministers to "de
clare and pronounce to his people, being penitent,
the absolution and remission of their sins"; and, as
a matter of practice, he himself, at a certain crisis
in my life, recommended to me, when I told him
that I wished to go to Confession, a "discreet and
learned" clergyman to whom I had better apply;
yet he never urged the practice, so far as I am aware,
upon anyone, and never went to Confession him
self. He believed,. then, in the Power of the Keys;
yet he seemed to hold simultaneously that this
relief was to be sought only if peace of mind could
not be obtained by other means, unless, indeed, he
held, as I think possible, that the Power was effec
tively exercised in the public "absolutions" uttered
in the course of the Church services. He appears,
therefore, on the surface, to have held that the
authority given with such extraordinary solemnity
by Christ to His Apostles, was not in the least

io CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

even normally necessary to the forgiveness of post-
baptismal mortal sin.

Now I am perfectly convinced that my father did
not believe himself inconsistent — that he had, in
fact, principles which reconciled to his own mind
these apparent contradictions. Yet I never knew,
and do not now know, what they were. For, though
he loved nothing better than to be consulted by his
children on religious matters, as a matter of fact
he was not very approachable by timid minds.
I used always to be a little afraid of showing igno
rance, and still more of shocking him. Never once,
in a genuine difficulty, did I find him anything but
utterly tender and considerate; yet his intense
personality and his almost fierce faith continually
produced in me the illusion that he would think it
unfilial for me to do anything except acquiesce in
stantly in his judgment; the result was that I was
often completely at a loss as to what that judgment
was.

Religion at home, then, was always coloured and
vivified by my father's individuality. I remember
even now the sense of finality and completeness
which it conveyed. The morning and evening
services, first in the tiny prayer room at Lincoln,
where my father was Chancellor from my first to my

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT n

fifth year, then in the beautiful minute chapel at
Lis Escop, Truro, where he was Bishop until after
my thirteenth birthday, and finally in the lovely
chapels at Lambeth and Addington after his eleva
tion to the see of Canterbury — these services, every
detail of which was thought out by my father and
carried out liturgically and reverently, still have
a strange aroma to my mind that I suppose my
memory will never lose.

Other ways in which my father influenced my
religion were as follows.

On Sunday afternoons in the country we would
walk with him, rather slowly and recollectedly, for
about an hour and a half; and during these expedi
tions one of us would usually read aloud, or some-
tunes my father himself would read aloud from some
religious book. I do not think that these books
were very well selected for a boy's point of view.
The poems of George Herbert were frequently read
on these occasions, and these very peculiar, scholarly,
and ingenious meditations used to produce in me,
occasionally, a sudden thrill of pleasure, but far more
commonly a kind of despairing impatience. Or,
again, some interminable life of a saint or a volume
of Church history would be read; or a book of Dean
Stanley's on the Holy Land. Once only can I

12 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

remember, with real delight, so far back as early in
the eighties, how my father fascinated me for half
an hour or so by reading aloud, as we walked, the
martyrdom of St. Perpetua and her companions. I
remember, too, the irrepressible awe with which I
discovered presently that he had been translating
aloud and at sight, in perfect English and without
hesitation, from the Latin "Acta Martyrum."

At the close of these Sunday walks, and some
times also on weekdays after breakfast, we would
go to my father's study for Bible-reading or Greek
Testament. It is difficult to describe these lessons.
For the most part my father would comment con
tinuously and brilliantly, though often far above my
capacity to understand, putting questions occasion
ally, showing great pleasure when we answered
intelligently, or, still more, when we put reasonable
questions of our own, and a rather oppressive dis
appointment when we were listless or stupid. It
was all extremely stimulating to the intellect; it
was, also, always somewhat of a strain; but I think
now that its lack consisted in the predominance of
the mind element over the soul. I do not remember
that these lessons made it easier to love God; they
were often interesting, and sometimes absorbing; but
I do not, with all reverence to my father's memory,

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 13

even now believe that in myself they developed the
spiritual side of religion. For himself, with his own
great spirituality, it was natural enough that his
soul should find pleasurable activity in the intellec
tual scholarly plane; for myself there was a consid
erable tendency to think that intellectualism and
Greek Testament ought to be the very heart of
religion. For a child, I believe, there are other
moulds more natural than that of the intellect in
which spiritual life may shape itself: little pieces of
ceremonial, connected, for example, with the saying
of his prayers, actions of reverence, such as the
sign of the cross or the fingering of beads, symbolic
objects of worship, such as crucifixes or statues,
and, for instruction, an almost endless use of attrac
tive and well-drawn pictures — these, I believe,
are a better machinery for the shaping and develop
ment of a child's spiritual life than the methods of
the intellect. I remember, for instance, that while
George Herbert's poems usually bored and irritated
me, I found a real attraction in the quaint devices
of "Easter wings" or the " altar" — the outlines,
that is to say, in which once or twice he prints his
verses on the page.

As regards morality, I was also a little puzzled
by my father's attitude. He had a very great

i4 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

sense of the duty of obedience, and this sense, I
think, rather overpowering in its sternness, tended
to obscure to some extent in my own mind the
various grades of objective wrongdoing. Two or
three sins stood out to me in my childhood, as
supremely wicked — such things as lying, thieving,
and cruelty. But beyond these practically all
other sins seemed to me about the same; to climb
over the wire fences that bounded the drive at Lis
Escop by putting one's feet anywhere except at
the point where the wire pierced the upright railings
— (my father bade me always do this to avoid
stretching the wire) — seemed to me about as wicked
as to lose my temper, to sulk, or to be guilty of mean
ness. In this way, to some degree, one's apprecia
tion of morality was, I think, a little dulled: since
to forget an order, or to disregard it in a moment of
blinding excitement, was visited by my father with
what appeared to be as much anger as if it had been
a deliberate moral fault. Once, later, at Eton, I was
accused of grave cruelty to another boy and was very
nearly flogged for it. I happened to be innocent and,
ultimately, cleared myself entirely of the charge
after a very searching examination by the head
master; but for the time, after the news of the
charge had come to my father in the holidays

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 15

while I was at home, I was very nearly paralyzed
in mind by the appalling atmosphere of my father's
indignation and wholly failed to defend myself
except by tears and silent despair. Yet all the time
I was conscious of a faint relief in the knowledge
that even if I were guilty — and at the time so con
fused was I that I really scarcely knew whether I
were guilty or not — my father could not possibly
be angrier with me than he had been, for instance,
when I threw stones at the goldfish in the pond or
played with my fingers during prayers.

Such, more or less, was my father's influence
upon my religious life. I do not, as I have said,
think that he made it easy to love God; but he did,
undoubtedly, establish in my mind an ineradicable
sense of a Moral Government in the universe, of a
tremendous Power behind phenomena, of an austere
and orderly dignity with which this Moral Power
presented itself. He himself was wonderfully tender
hearted and loving, intensely desirous of my good,
and, if I had but known it, touchingly covetous of my
love and confidence; yet his very anxiety on my be
half to some degree obscured the fire of his love, or,
rather, caused it to affect me as heat rather than as
light. He dominated me completely by his own
forcefulness, and I felt when he died, as a man said

16 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

to me of his own parallel experience, as if the roof
were lifted off the world.

§ 3. At my private school in Clevedon we attended
a church rather more "high" than those to which
I had been accustomed. It contained a dark, mys
tical-looking sanctuary, with iron and brass gates;
the clergy wore coloured stoles, and Gregorian chants
were in use. But I have not the slightest recollec
tion of being astonished at any difference of doctrine
from that which I had learned; though I was, I
think, a little awed and curious at the minute varia
tions of ritual, and certainly depressed by the species
of plain-song we employed.

At Eton, however, I found myself back again in
the familiar academic atmosphere of plain dignity,
beautiful singing, and indefiniteness of dogma; and
it was here, I suppose, that I should have received
deep impressions of religion. But I did not, nor
did any other boy of my acquaintance, so far as I
am aware. My Confirmation was postponed a year
or two, because I was supposed to be indifferent
to it, as indeed I was. I regarded it as a seemly
ceremony, to be undergone with gravity, and to
represent a kind of spiritual coming of age; and I
was really surprised when, upon at last inquiring
of my father as to when I was to be confirmed, since

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 17

most of my friends already were so, I was told that
I ought to have been confirmed a year before, but
that the rite had been postponed because I had not
seemed to desire it. However, since I had taken
the initiative at last, it should be as I suggested. I
heard this with a faint sense of injustice; for I had
become so accustomed to follow my father's lead in
matters of religion that it had never even occurred
to me that in any matter I ought to take the initia
tive myself.

But even Confirmation, combined with very loving
and impressive talks from my father, made no dif
ference to me. For my preparation I went to
"m'tutor," who talked to me about half a dozen
times alone, chiefly on morality and the need of being
strenuous. I cannot remember that much was said
about doctrine; it was, rather, taken for granted.
For example, a kind of informal confession was sug
gested to me tentatively, though no word was said
of absolution, and indeed the idea of such a thing
was completely unfamiliar to me. I answered that
I had nothing I wished to reveal. Finally, Dr.
Goulburn's "Personal Religion," a stout, unattrac
tive book, was presented to me. A year or two ago
I found it again, and noticed that the leaves were
still uncut. So little impression, in fact, did the

i8 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

whole affair make on me that I cannot remember
even what Bishop it was that performed the cere
mony; though I think it must have been the famous
historian, Dr. Stubbs, of Oxford.

The only incident connected with my confirma
tion that is really clear to my mind is an anxious
consultation held afterwards with three friends as
to whether it would be decent to play fives in the
afternoon, or whether it would be more proper to
spend the time in decorous silence. We were not,
I believe, in the least hypocritical or contemptuous;
we wished to do what was right in the matter; and
if fives could be reconciled with it, so much the better.
We decided to play, and did so with a slightly
chastened air. My mother also, soon after, gave
me a little silver Maltese cross, engraved with the
date of my confirmation — March 26, 1887. I wore
it on my watch chain for a while — for at Eton at
that time there was as little opposition as enthusi
asm towards religion — and presently lost it.

On the day of Communion I think I was rather
more impressed. It was all unusual and mysteri
ous; for only once before in my life had I even
attended the service. I vaguely believed that I
entered into a closer relationship with my Divine
Ruler than ever before; and, although I was slightly

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 19

depressed at the thought that in future I must
behave myself better, I believed that I sincerely
intended to do so.

Two other incidents I also remember connected
with religion about this time. The first was my
discovery, in a deserted tower-room at Lambeth, of
a copy of Dr. Ken's Prayers for Winchester scholars,
which somehow appealed to my imagination, and
in which my father with great pleasure wrote my
name when I asked him if I might have the book.
I used this assiduously for a few months, liking, I
think, the English and a certain gracious formality
about the book Then I dropped my prayers alto
gether and only went to Communion — though
each time, I think, with tolerably good intentions —
so often as it was necessary to avoid attention.

The second incident was one entirely uncharac
teristic of Eton. The son of an Evangelical dig
nitary underwent some sort of a religious crisis at
home and set to work with praiseworthy zeal upon
his acquaintances. I was one of them, and was
persuaded by him, with a friend of mine, to attend
a Bible -reading, with prayer, held in his room.
About four other boys assembled, and we sat there
in horror, exchanging furtive glances while our
leader expounded. At the sound of a footstep out-

20 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

side, Bibles vanished as if in conjuring tricks, and
the exercises, I remember, were brought to an end
after two meetings by a sudden irrepressible explosion
of laughter from my own particular friend. He
sat there, scarlet-faced, with the tears streaming
down his cheeks and laughter bursting from him in
successive explosions, while the rest of us giggled
and eyed our instructor alternately. I think that the
whole affair would have been extremely unhealthy
if it had affected us in the slightest. Fortunately
it did not, and we came away with our opinion un
changed that such zeal was all rather bad form and
of no value.

Our evangelizer, however, was not discouraged,
and his next attempt was more serious. He managed
somehow to persuade an "old boy" to come down to
Eton and address the house, which he did, I regret
to say, in the presence of the house-master. It was
very terrible. He delivered an emotional speech
that was practically an open confession of his own
evil living at school. I do not think I have ever
seen boys more sincerely horrified — not indeed
at the substance of his story, but at the appalling
"bad form" of alluding to it in a public manner.

This same attitude towards morality manifested
itself in other ways. Chapel services at Eton

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 21

counted for very little indeed usually in a religious
direction; they were rather artistic, very academic,
and represented, I think, the same kind of official
homage to Almighty God as cheering the Queen
when she came to see us, or when we, as on the occa
sion of her first Jubilee, went to the Castle to see
her, represented our loyalty towards Victoria. You
might or might not be personally enthusiastic, but
at least you must pay a seemly deference. Now
and again, however, one clerical master in particu
lar would make an honest attempt to appeal person
ally in a sermon to the consciences of his hearers,
especially on the subject of purity. Now his
hearers, in the main, had no common code on the
matter at all. A boy might be fantastically evil in
that regard or scrupulously fastidious, without in
the least forfeiting the respect of his fellows; it
was, according to the Eton code of that time,
simply a matter of personal taste. Some things
you must not be : you must not be personally dirty,
or a coward, or a bully, or a thief; but in this other
matter you could choose for yourself without being
thought either a blackguard or a prude, if you made
the one choice, or if you made the other. These ap
peals, therefore, from the pulpit, made usually with a
great deal of sincere ardour, were merely looked upon

22 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

as slightly absurd. The authorities had their view
on the subject, of course — we knew that — and
we had the other. No kind of impression, therefore,
was ever made by these fervent discourses — since
the preacher was nothing of a real orator — and
no comment ever uttered upon them except an ob
servation, perhaps, that " A- —seemed very excited
to-day." In a word, such warmth of feeling upon
a subject on which our minds were completely made
up, one way or the other, seemed to us to be slightly
bad form. In any case, too, it was not a subject
for public discussion.

It was the lack of individual dealing with the soul,
then, that was accountable for so much evil. Efforts
have been recently made, I believe, to remedy this
in some degree; and yet the true and only remedy
is, as a matter of fact, practically impossible. Until
something resembling the business-like system of
.Catholic schools in the encouragement of private
devotion, the regularity of Confession, or at least
the recognition of some such practice as a reasonable
mode of relief — until these things in some form
or another find their places in the great Protestant
public schools, I do not understand how the
public formalities of religion can be anything more
than formalities. And yet nothing but the peculiar

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 23

safeguards of the Catholic Confessional can really
meet the case, and these, from the very nature of
the case, are out of the question. A purely volun
tary system of Confession, such as they practised
at the Woodard schools, though better than nothing,
yet has unavoidable drawbacks.

§ 4. It was after leaving Eton, and before going
up to Cambridge, that I received what was really
the first touch of personal religion. I was in London
for a year or so, and for a short time I was vaguely
interested by Theosophy; then suddenly I became
entirely absorbed and fascinated by the music and
dignity of worship in St. Paul's Cathedral. The
high celebration there is, indeed, as Gounod is
supposed to have said, one of the most impressive
religious functions in Europe. I began to go to
Communion every week and to attend every other
service that I could possibly manage — sometimes
in the organ loft, watching the mysteries of the
keys and stops, sometimes sitting in the stalls. I
did not in the least appreciate the sermons, though
I was vaguely affected by Canon Liddon. It was
the music, first and last, and it was through that
opening that I first began to catch glimpses of the
spiritual world; and my sense of worship was further
developed and directed by an absolute passion that

24 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

I conceived for Mr. Shorthouse's book, "John
Inglesant." I read it again and again, as I read
it still, though aware of its tendency to Pantheism;
and even now I know passages of it by heart, par
ticularly those dealing with the Person of Our Lord.
It seemed that I had found at last the secret of those
vague religious ceremonies to which I had always
conformed with uninterested equanimity. A very
warm friendship or two, also formed at this time,
helped me in the same direction.

§ 5. At Cambridge everything receded once more,
with the exception of a sudden short and intense
interest in Swedenborgianism. Then I lost all
interest. I neglected my prayers, except for a while
when my father gave me a beautiful edition of
Bishop Andrews' "Preces Privatae" in Greek and
Latin; I almost gave up Communion; and the sole
thread that was left to attach me in any sense to
the supernatural was, once more, music. I very
seldom attended my own chapel, but went instead
continually to the evening service at King's, which,
in another way from that of St. Paul's Cathedral,
was, and is, quite incomparable. About half a
dozen times, too, I attended — with a recent con
vert, also an old Etonian — High Mass at the
Catholic church, where I worked later as a priest;

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 25

but it made no impression on me, except one of
vaguely mingled contempt and awe. But I re
member distinctly an agreeable sense of shock and
elation when at the Asperges one day I felt a drop
of holy water on my face. My friend lent to me a
" Garden of the Soul/' which I never returned to
him. Twelve years later, when I was myself a
Catholic, I wrote to remind him of this, observing
that now the book was more mine than ever.

Of course what religion I had was very little more
than artistic; it made no sort of difference to my
actions, but it kept me just in touch with things
that were not wholly of this world.

My relations with regard to religion are very
aptly illustrated by a little adventure I passed
through in Switzerland about this time.

One of my brothers and I were ascending the
Piz Palu, a peak of the Bernina range in the Engadine,
and upon reaching the summit after a very laborious
climb from a little after midnight until eight o'clock
in the morning through very heavy snow, my heart
suddenly collapsed. I was dosed with neat brandy,
but owing to very severe training recently undergone
at Cambridge to reduce my steering weight, this
failed properly to restore me, and for about two
hours I was carried along the arete of the mountain

26 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

apparently unconscious: my brother, indeed, for
the greater part of that time thought me actually
dead. Now although I appeared unconscious, and
for a while was so, I was perfectly aware, even when
my senses failed to act, that I was dying; I even
began to speculate what would be the first phenome
non of the supernatural world that would disclose
itself to me; and I fancied, owing no doubt to the
suggestion conveyed to me by the vast icy peaks
on which I had closed my eyes, that this would be
a vision of the Great White Throne. Yet never for
one instant was I conscious of the least touch of
apprehensiveness at the thought of meeting God,
nor of the least impulse to make an act of contrition
for my past life. My religion, such as it was, was
of so impersonal and unvital a nature that, while
I never doubted the objective truth of what I had
been taught, I neither feared God nor loved Him:
I felt no sense of responsibility towards Him, nor
was I even moved at the prospect, of seeing Him.
I acquiesced passively in my belief that He was
present, but neither shrank from Him in fear nor
aspired towards Him with affection.

And this, I think, was typical of my whole atti
tude towards religion in ordinary life. Intellec
tually I accepted the Christian Creed; scarcely

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 27

at all with my will or my emotion. Except in
moments, or for short periods of superficial excite
ment, I was wholly uninterested. My religion had
no spark in it of real vitality.

In fact, my closest friend at this time was an
explicitly dogmatic atheist — I think the only one
I have met — and I was conscious of no particularly
alarming gulf between us. One other friend of
mine also was a Catholic, and with him I used to
argue sometimes. But I do not think it ever oc
curred to me as even conceivable that his tenets
could be anything but obviously absurd, though I
remember being extremely annoyed one day
when my atheist friend, being appealed to as an
arbitrator, declared that, granted Christianity,
Catholicism was its only possible interpretation.
For the most part, however, I was really indifferent,
spending a good deal of time in hypnotism in which
I was tolerably proficient. No person in authority
ever, so far as I can remember, made the slightest
effort to approach me on matters of religion.

§ 6. And then — even to this day I do not know
why — I decided to become a clergyman. I think
the death of one of my sisters about this time helped
me to the decision. But, for the rest, I suspect that
my motives rose largety from the fact that a clerical

28 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

life seemed to me to offer the line of least resistance.
I am sure that I was not calculating enough to argue
to myself that being my father's son would bring
me emoluments or promotion; for, honestly, these
were no temptation to me at all; but I think that,
on the natural side at any rate, a life spent in an
ecclesiastical household, and the absence of any other
particular interest, seemed to indicate the following
of my father's profession as, on the whole, the
simplest solution of the problems of my future. I
knew, too, that my decision would give him ex
traordinary pleasure, and I valued his approval
very highly indeed.

But I think I was fairly conscientious about it all.
I still had, from time to time, romantic experiences
in spiritual matters and loved, spasmodically and
sentimentally, or thought I loved, the Person of
Our Divine Lord, as suggested to me by "John
Inglesant"; and I intended, sincerely enough, to
embrace the clerical life with my heart and will,
and to live it as little unworthily as possible. These
intentions too were, as I have said, clinched and
brought to a point by the very keen emotions I
experienced at the death of my sister, and by a
little message she sent to me from her death
bed.

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 29

Things were changed a little then; I began to
read theology and became interested in it, especially
in dogma, such as it was, and Church history. But
it did not even enter my head for an instant that
there was anything but the Church of England to
represent Christ's original institution. I did not
in the least hold, as I tried to hold later, that the
Anglican communion was the "Catholic Church"
in England, and the Roman communion the Church
of the Continent. In fact I remember once in Swit
zerland remonstrating with a High Church lady who
held such views and acted upon them by hearing
Mass in a Catholic chapel. The Roman Catholics,
I thought, were obviously corrupt and decayed,
the Ritualists were tainted, and the extreme Protes
tants were noisy, extravagant, and vulgar. Plainly
there was only one religious life possible, that of a
quiet country clergyman, with a beautiful garden,
an exquisite choir, and a sober bachelor existence.
Marriage seemed to me then, as always, quite
inconceivable.

§ 7. I read for Orders for a year and a half with
Dean Vaughan at LlandafT. He was a very unique
and exceptional man, and it was owing no doubt
to his extraordinary charm of personality and his
high spirituality that my father, in spite of the

30 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

divergence of his views from those of the Dean,
decided to place me under his charge. I think that
he was in some respects the most remarkable preacher
I have ever heard. He wrote out his sermons with
infinite pains, word for word, destroying, I believe,
the entire manuscript and beginning it all over again
if he were interrupted during his composition of it;
and then delivering it word for word from his paper
with scarcely a gesture except quick, slight glances
and almost timid movements of his head. But
the English was simply perfect, comparable only,
I think, to that of Ruskin and Newman; his voice
was as smooth and pointed and pliable as the blade
of a rapier; and above all, he possessed that magnetic
kind of personality that affected his educated hearers,
at any rate, like a strain of music. He was a pro
nounced Evangelical in his views: I still possess
somewhere a couple of sets of notes that I wrote
for him, under his influence, on the sacraments of
Baptism and the Lord's Supper, in which anything
approaching to sacramental doctrine is explicitly
denied. Yet his faith was so radiantly strong, his
love of the Person of our Lord so intense, that his
pupils, I think, whatever their predispositions,
were almost unconscious of the lack of other things.
When we were under his spell it appeared as if no

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 31

more could be necessary than the love and devotion
of our master to God.

His wife too, a sister of Dean Stanley, was another
great feature in our life. She was a strange old
lady, resembling in face Queen Victoria, and one
of the cleverest women I have ever met. She
talked and wrote letters brilliantly and wittily,
and it was a real delight to be in her company.
When three or four of us were bidden to dinner
at the Deanery, we used to compare our notes of
invitation in order to triumph in her variety of ex
pression. Each note was quite different from all
the rest, yet each was vivid. I remember the
Dean's gentle pleasure when he discovered that,
during a grave illness of his, his wife had, in despair
of his recovery, actually engaged a house to retire
to for her widowhood. He told us the facts in her
presence, while she jerked her features about in
humorous protest. "No, my dear," said the Dean
at last, with his eyes twinkling like stars, "you see
I'm not dead yet, after all, and I'm afraid you won't
get to your new house just yet."

We led a very harmless life, reading Greek
Testament with the Dean every morning, com
posing a sermon for him once a week, play
ing a great deal of football, and attending the

32 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

cathedral services every day. It was one of the
proudest days of my life when I was selected by
a club to play half-back against Cardiff. But
here, in spite of the Dean's strong Evangelical
ism, commended though it was by his charming
and spiritual personality, I began to have a glim
mer of more Catholic views, and, for the first time
in my life, began to prefer Communion before
breakfast. This was partly through the influence
of a particular man with whom I made great friends.
"John Inglesant" also began again to reassert his
power, and I even made a journey or two here and
there to see houses where I might set up, I imagined,
an institution resembling that of Nicholas Ferrar
at Little Gidding, where, however, women were
to be strictly excluded. We were to lead a very
recondite life, I remember, in a kind of scholarly
solitude; but I do not remember that self-denial
in any form was to play a part in it. Yet the inten
tion was certainly good, for the chief object of the
life, so far as I contemplated it, was to increase
the union of our souls with the Person of Our
Blessed Lord.

§ 8. I was ordained deacon in 1894, after a very
strange, solitary retreat, in which for about a week
all religious sense deserted me. My retreat was

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 33

made near Lincoln, where years ago I had lived as
a child. I engaged a couple of rooms in the lodge
of an old park about four or five miles out of the
city and arranged my day in what I thought a
suitable manner, giving certain hours to prayer
and meditation, to the recitation of the Little
Hours, in English, and to exercise. Of course it
was an impossibly mad thing to do. I was in
a state of tense excitement at the prospect of
my ordination to the ministry; I knew nothing
whatever about my own soul and the dangers of in
trospection, and still less about the science of prayer.
The result was such mental agony as I cannot
even now remember without an ache of mind. It
seemed to me, after a day or two, that there was no
truth in religion, that Jesus Christ was not God,
that the whole of life was an empty sham, and that
I was, if not the chiefest of sinners, at any rate the
most monumental of fools. I still remember the
torment of Advent Sunday. I walked in the dark
of the morning, fasting, into Lincoln, went to
Communion in the Cathedral, and attended the
services later in the day, sitting in the dusky nave,
like a soul in hell. I still cannot read the magnifi
cent collect for Advent Sunday, as appointed in the
Book of Common Prayer — the rolling phrases

34 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

about the "works of darkness" and the "armour
of light/'- -or the tramping hymn, "Lo! He comes
with clouds descending," without an echo of the
horror coming back to me. It was on this day that
for the first time I set eyes on Bishop King -
even then a bent old man with a wonderfully
spiritual face, walking swiftly and swayingly at
the end of the procession — the Bishop who had
recently been tried in my father's Court at Lambeth
on charges of Ritualism.

Matters got a little better with me towards the
end of my retreat; a kind of dull luminousness of
faith came back, and at last I went back to Adding-
ton for my ordination to the diaconate, though still
shaken and, so to speak, still spiritually hysterical.

The ordination itself distracted and helped me.
It was held by my father in Croydon parish church.
I was selected as "Gospeller"; and Canon Mason,
the late master of Pembroke College, Cambridge,
preached an exceedingly fine and enkindling sermon.
I remember one extremely subtle and witty sen
tence of it. He was speaking of the doctrinal
divisions/ in the Church of England; and, seeking
to reassure us on the point, combined geographical
and dogmatic dissension, together with a fine
alliterativeness, in one sweeping phrase. "For all

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 35

our divisions/' he said, "we are yet united in objec
tive truth. One form of words, and one only, is
being uttered to-day in every diocese — from
Carlisle to Canterbury, from Lincoln to Liverpool."

On the following Christmas Day I assisted my
father in the administration of Communion in
Addington church, and then went at once to work
in East London, at the Eton mission; and here, for
the first time, High Church ideas began to take
definite gradual possession of me. The occasion
of it was as follows.

I received an invitation, a month after my ordina
tion, to be present at a retreat at Kemsing, near
Sevenoaks, given by one of the Cowley "Fathers."
I went, in high collars and a white tie, and was
completely taken by storm. For the first time Chris
tian Doctrine, as Father Maturin preached it, dis
played itself to me as an orderly scheme. I saw now
how things fitted on one to the other, how the
sacraments followed inevitably from the Incarna
tion, how body and spirit were alike met in the mercy
of God. The preacher was extraordinarily eloquent
and deep; he preached hour after hour; he caught
up my fragments of thought, my glimpses of spirit
ual experience, my gropings in the twilight, and
showed me the whole, glowing and transfigured in

36 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

an immense scheme whose existence I had not
suspected. He touched my heart also, profoundly,
as well as my head, revealing to me the springs and
motives of my own nature in a completely new
manner. Especially he preached Confession, show
ing its place in the divine economy; but this, very
naturally, I strenuously resisted. It was not a
strict retreat, and I talked freely in the afternoon
with two friends, endeavouring to persuade myself
that Confession was no more than an occasional
medicine for those who felt they needed it. But
the work was done, though I did not know it until
a year later. This, however, I took away, explicit,
from the retreat — a desire to make my own that
religion which I had heard preached. But there
were certain difficulties before me.

The parish to which my father was sending me
was not run on at all extreme lines. Confession
was distinctly discouraged and the Communion
was celebrated on Sundays and Thursdays only.
It was an extremely beautiful church, built by
Bodley on High Church lines, with Latin inscrip
tions quite incomprehensible to the congregation.
The previous vicar, who had now become Bishop of
Zululand, and was a distinct High Churchman, had
been recently succeeded by a chaplain of my father's

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 37

— the Rev. St. Clair Donaldson, now Archbishop
of Brisbane, whose views were much more Evangeli
cal. Mr. Donaldson was a magnificent worker;
great men's clubs were in full swing, and activities
of every kind — Bands of Hope, Temperance Meet
ings, a ladies' settlement, children's plays, and,
above all, systematic house to house visiting -
occupied our time. But the original High Church
methods of Bishop Carter had been largely modified,
the daily celebration had been abolished, and the
Anglican sisters, who had previously worked in the
parish, had, thereupon, withdrawn. I believe that
the Vicar did occasionally hear confessions in the
vestry from two or three adherents of the old system,
but he certainly neither preached nor encouraged
the practice in any way.

In spite of his influence, however, the ideas sown
in my mind by Father Maturin began to sprout. It
seemed to me then, and it seems to me still, even
looking at it from the Anglican point of view, as if
the only hope of really touching and holding the lives
of those who live under the stress of East London
sordidness and pressure, lies in what may be called
the materialisation of religion — I mean the supplying
of acts and images on which religious emotion may
concentrate itself. Extreme definiteness seems neces-

38 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

sary, and that, not only in the bright and impressive
adjuncts of worship, but in the modes in which
individual approach to God is made. Men's clubs,
where religious and political conversation is against
the rules, (as was the case in ours), furious visiting,
children's pantomimes, and general activity and
fervour certainly have their place and function;
but unless the individual understands where and
how he may discharge his penitence or adoration,
not merely as a member of a congregation, but as
an unique soul which God has made and redeemed,
piety can never be more than vague and diffusive.
I dimly felt this, even then, and, since a man's soul
is nearer to himself than any other can be, I began
to see that I must begin with myself.

The end of it was that just before my ordination
as "priest" I made, with my father's consent, for
the first time, a full confession of my whole life
before a clergyman. He was extraordinarily kind
and skilful, though he gave me a penance which
would occupy me half an hour every day until I
came to him again, three months after. And the
joy that followed that confession was simply inde
scribable. I went home in a kind of ecstasy.

My ordination also was an immense happiness,
though I see now that there was a considerable

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 39

feverishness in my emotions. I went into the
Addington woods alone, telling myself that I was
now a priest, that I could do for others what had
been recently done for me; and I went back to East
London full of enthusiasm.

§ 9. About this time, too, I began to take up
again my acquaintance with the Cambridge friend
with whom I had had many arguments — now an
Oratorian novice — and went to see him several
times; but I do not think it ever seriously entered
my head that his intellectual position could possibly
be anything but ridiculous. Still, he was a charming
man, and, I have no doubt, did much to break down
the wall of misunderstanding that separated my
mind from his. I was perfectly confident, perfectly
content, and perfectly obstinate. So fearless was
I of his influence that I even went to stay with him
on the coast of Cornwall, and while there, having
no cassock of my own, borrowed and, in a sort of
joyful excitement, wore his Religious habit in the
pulpit of the little parish church.

In October, 1896, my father suddenly died on his
knees in church during a visit to Mr. Gladstone at
Hawarden. I was superintending the Sunday school
at the Eton Mission when a telegram was put into
my hands announcing the fact. On my way up to

40 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

Hawarden that night I recited as usual the Evening
Prayer appointed for the day, and in the Second
Lesson read the words: "Lord, suffer me first to go
and bury my father and then I will follow Thee."

The days that followed were full of dignity and
sorrow. It seemed incredible that my father was
dead. He had just returned from Ireland, where
he had paid a kind of semi-official visit to the Irish
Protestant Church; he had seemed full of vitality.
His last written words, found on his dressing-room
table, were a draft of a letter to the "Times" on the
subject of the Pope's Bull, just issued, condemning
Anglican Orders as null and void. I celebrated the
Communion service in Hawarden church before we
left with the coffin for Canterbury, and gave Com
munion to Mr. Gladstone. My father's body lay
in its coffin before the altar, covered with the same
pall which afterwards, I believe, lay on the coffin of
Mr. Gladstone himself. The funeral was wonder
fully impressive. A great storm of wind, rain, and
thunder raged outside while we laid within the
Cathedral, near the west doors, the body of the first
Archbishop to be buried there since the Reformation.
It still seemed incredible, as we went home, that
we should not find that same vital and eager per
sonality to greet us as we came back to Addington.

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 41

A week later my health suddenly and completely
broke down and I was ordered to Egypt for the
winter, at a week's notice. My last request to my
Vicar, I remember, before hearing this news, had
been to the effect that we night have a daily cele
bration in future in the church, in place of the two
weekly ones that had been in use previously. But it
was thought better not.

n

Up to the time of my father's death I do not
think that a doubt had ever crossed my mind as to
the claims of Catholicism. Once, I remember, in
Birdcage Walk, as my father and I were riding back
to Lambeth, I said to him suddenly that I did not
really understand the phrase of the Creed, "I believe
in the Holy Catholic Church." "For instance,"
I said, "are the Roman Catholics a part of the
Church of Christ?"

My father was silent for a moment. Then he
said that God only knew for certain who were or
were not within the Church: it might be perhaps
that the Roman Catholics had so far erred in their
doctrinal beliefs as to have forfeited their place in
the Body of Christ. I suppose I was satisfied with
his answer; for I do not remember having considered
the subject any further at the time.

But within six weeks of my father's death,
matters began to appear to me in a new light, and
it was during the five months that I spent in the

44 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

East that for the first time the claims of the Catholic
Church showed themselves to me. It came about
in this way.

§ i. First, I believe, my contentment with the
Church of England suffered a certain shock by my
perceiving what a very small and unimportant
affair the Anglican communion really was. There
we were, travelling through France and Italy down
to Venice, seeing in passing church after church whose
worshippers knew nothing of us, or of our claims.
I had often been abroad before, but never since I
had formally identified myself with the official side
of the Church of England. Now I looked at things
through more professional eyes, and, behold! we
were nowhere. Here was this vast continent ap
parently ignorant of our existence! I believed
myself a priest, yet I could not say so to strangers
without qualifying clauses. We arrived at Luxor
at last, and found the usual hotel chaplain in posses
sion; and I occasionally assisted him in the services.
But it was all terribly isolated and provincial.
Besides, he happened to be a strong Evangelical,
and I had very little sense of having much in com
mon with him. He would not have dreamed of
describing himself as a "priest." (He was ultimately
killed, by the way, with his whole family in the

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 45

earthquake at Messina where he was acting as
English chaplain.)

§ 2. This growing discomfort was brought to a
point one day when I was riding in the village by
myself and went, purely by a caprice, into the little
Catholic church there. It stood among the mud-
houses; there was no atmosphere of any European
protection about it, and it had a singularly unin
viting interior. There was in it a quantity of
muslin and crimped paper and spangles. But I
believe now that it was in there that for the first
time anything resembling explicit Catholic faith
stirred itself within me. The church was so ob
viously a part of the village life; it was on a level
with the Arab houses; it was open; it was exactly
like every other Catholic church, apart from its
artistic shortcomings. It was not in the least an
appendage to European life, carried about (like an
India rubber bath), for the sake of personal comfort
and the sense of familiarity. Even if it did not
possess one convert, it was at least looking in the
right direction. I cannot say that I explicitly recog
nized all this at the time, but I am aware that
here for the first time it occurred to me as seriously
conceivable that Rome was right and we wrong;
and my contempt for the Catholic Church began to

46 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

take upon it a tinge of respectful fear. For my re
assurance I made great friends with the Coptic
priest and even, after my return to England, sent
him a pair of brass candlesticks for his altar.

I began also to reason with myself a little and to
fortify myself deliberately in my Anglican position.
While in Cairo I had had two audiences of the
schismatic Coptic Patriarch, and I now wrote to him,
asking that I might be admitted to communion in
the Coptic churches, desiring in some way to assure
myself that we were not so much isolated as ap
peared. I did not care in the slightest whether the
Copts were tainted by heresy or not (for there
was a proverb about glass houses), but I did
care that we Anglicans seemed so lonely and pro
vincial. I began, in other words, for the first time
to be aware of an instinct for Catholic communion.
A national church seemed a poor affair abroad.
The Patriarch did not answer, and I was left
shivering.

§ 3. As I came back alone through Jerusalem
and the Holy Land, my discomfort increased. Here
again, in the birthplace of Christendom, we were
less than nothing. It is true that the Anglican
Bishop was extremely kind, asked me to preach in
his chapel, gave me a tiny gold cross (now hanging

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 47

on an image of Our Lady), and obtained permission
for me to celebrate the Communion in the Chapel
of Abraham. Yet even this was not particularly
reassuring. We were not allowed to use the Greek
altar; a table was wheeled in, with the vestments
provided by the Anglican "Confraternity of the
Blessed Sacrament"; and there, distracted and
unhappy, watched from the doorway by politely
curious Greeks, I celebrated what I believed to be
the divine mysteries, weighted down by a sense of
loneliness.

In all the churches it was the same. Every
Eastern heretical and schismatical sect imaginable
took its turn at the altar of the Holy Sepulchre, for
each had at least the respectability of some centuries
behind it, — some sort of historical continuity. I saw
strange, uncouth rites in Bethlehem. But the
Anglican Church, which I had been accustomed to
think of as the sound core of a rotten tree, this had
no privileges anywhere; it was as if it did not exist;
or, rather, it was recognised and treated by the rest
of Christendom purely as a Protestant sect of
recent origin. In a kind of self-assertion I began
to wear my cassock publicly in the streets, to the
consternation of some Irish Protestants whose ac
quaintance I had made, and with whom, by the

48 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

way, I was distressed to think that I was in full
communion. I even had a kind of disputation with
a shopkeeper who said, in spite of my cassock, that
he supposed I was not a priest, but a clergyman.

There were other clergymen in the party with
whom I went up to Damascus, and two or three of
us, every morning before starting, celebrated the
Communion service in one of the tents. One of
them, an American, a very devout and earnest man,
not only said his Office publicly on horseback, but
had actually brought with him vestments, vessels,
candlesticks, and wafers. These I used with a secret
joy. I am happy to add that he, too, has been
received into the Catholic Church and ordained to
the priesthood.

§ 4. At Damascus I received one more blow. I
^S read in the " Guardian" that the preacher to whom
I owed all my knowledge of distinctively Catholic
doctrine, who had been the means of bringing me
to my first confession, had made his submission to
Rome. It is impossible to describe the horror and
the shock that this was to me. I wrote to him from
Damascus, — seeing even at the moment a kind of
half-superstitious omen in the thought of what other
conversion was associated with that place — a letter
which, I am happy to think now, contained not a

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 49

word of bitterness; but I received no answer. He
has told me since that the unreproachful tone of the
letter astonished him.

It was here, too, that once more my scheme for a
Religious House revived; and, in a kind of defiance
of the feelings that were beginning to trouble me,
I arranged with a friend that its constitution and
ceremonial were to be distinctively "English," by
which I meant Caroline. We were to wear no
eucharistic vestments,~"Eut full surplices and black
scarfs, and were to do nothing in particular.

In this kind of mood I came back to England as
to a haven of peace. There, I knew very well, I
should not be troubled daily and hourly by evidences
of my isolation, and I should find, moreover, exactly
the atmosphere of peace and beauty for which I
longed. I had been appointed assistant curate at
Kemsing, the village where I had been initiated for
the first time into the idea of orderly dogma; for
it was necessary for me still to have but light work,
owing to the state of my health.

§ 5. It was an extraordinarily happy life there
for about a year. The old church had been restored
with exquisite taste, the music was really beautiful,
the ceremonial dignified and "Catholic"; the
vicarage where I lived with my friend was a charm-

D

50 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

ing house and always full of charming people; and
in this entirely congenial atmosphere my troubles
disappeared.

It was here that for the first time, after a second
retreat preached by Father Maturin, my vicar
regularly introduced linen vestments in which we
celebrated the early Communion service every Sun
day. We did not, however, use these or the lights
and wafer bread at the midday celebrations, out
of consideration to the very Low Church views
of the squire, who, though himself a most charming
and courteous old man, was something very like a
fanatic on the side of ultra-Protestantism. I often
admired his extraordinary restraint as he entertained
my vicar and myself in his beautiful old house -
men whom he believed in his heart to be enemies of
the Cross of Christ and unconscious co-operators
with the Scarlet Woman of Rome. I did not much
like this plan of presenting one form of worship on
one occasion and another on another, for I grew
daily in High Church principles and was congratu
lated by the clergyman in London to whom I went
regularly to Confession about four times in the year,
on my instincts for "Catholicism." I think it was
at this period too that I joined three Ritualistic
societies — the "English Church Union," the "Con-

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 51

fraternity of the Blessed Sacrament," and the "Guild
of All Souls." Meantime I was very happy at
Kemsing.

It was quite possible, so long as one resolutely
focused one's eyes to the proper objects, to believe
that the Church of England was what she claimed
to be, the spiritual mother of the English and a
member of the Bride of Christ. I made several
friends, whom, I am thankful to say, I retain to this
day; I began to take pains with preaching: I did
a good deal of work with children. The only re
minders that ever came to me of external facts were
occasional clerical meetings, at which one was
reminded that all the world was not as Kemsing,
and occasional and piercing little paragraphs in the
newspapers to the effect that this man or that
had been "received into the Roman Catholic
Church."

§ 6. It was not for about a year, however, that
troubles reappeared, and I cannot remember what
it was exactly which caused them. I used to have
uncomfortable moments now and then, particularly
after singing the choral celebration, when I wondered
whether, after all, it was possible that I was wrong
and that the ceremony in which I had taken part,
rendered so beautiful by art and devotion, was no

52 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

more than a subjective effort to assert our claim to
what we did not possess. There was a brass in the
chancel to the memory of one "Thomas de Hoppe,"
a pre-Reformation priest, and I used to ask myself
sometimes what, honestly, Sir Thomas would think
of it all. But all thoughts such as these I treated as
temptations; I confessed them as sins; I read books
on the Anglican side; I did my utmost in one or two
cases to retain waverers; I thought to establish
myself by contemptuous language against the
"Italian Mission" -a phrase, I believe, originally
coined by my father.

I remember especially one incident which shows
how much these thoughts were in my mind at this
time. I was present on the west front of St. Paul's
Cathedral on the occasion of the Queen's Diamond
Jubilee, but I think I was as much interested in the
papal representative as in anyone else. I watched
him eagerly and tried to make myself believe that
he was impressed by the spectacle of the Church of
England in her full glory. It was really an inspiriting
sight, and I looked down with great enthusiasm at
the Archbishops and Bishops, assembled on the
steps, in positive copes. A rumour that they very
nearly had consented to wear mitres as well caused
great excitement in " Church Times" circles, and at

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 53

least it was pleasant to see their shining head-gear of
various descriptions. The Bishop of London, I
remember, wore a superb gold skull-cap which was
very nearly as good as a mitre, and I exulted to think
of the tales the Papist would have to tell when he
returned to his own arrogant friends. I was pleased
also, a day or two later, on being told by a clergyman
that he had actually been taken for a Roman priest
in the crowd.

Strangely enough, however, I was not greatly af
fected by the papal decision on Anglican Orders that
had appeared shortly before my leaving England.
It had certainly been a blow, especially as I had
been assured by one of the Anglican clergy who had
gone to proffer information to the Commission sitting
in Rome, that the decision would be in our favour;
but I was never greatly moved by it. I was con
scious of a certain bruised sensation in my soul
whenever I thought of it, but never in all my
Anglican days was I acutely affected either way by
the condemnation.

It was during this time that I received my first
confession — that of an Eton boy who was staying
near and who became a Catholic a few months later.
I remember my alarm at the thought of being dis
turbed during the ceremony, for, although confession

54 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

was occasionally preached in the place, it was very
seldom practised. So I locked the church door,
trembling with excitement, heard the confession,
and then went back to the house with a sense of
awful and splendid guilt.

§ 7. I began at last to be really restless. But
even this restlessness, I perceived at the time, lay
rather in the intuitive than the intellectual region.
Though I read controversial books and comforted
myself with Dr. Littledale's collection of sneers,
I knew that this did not really touch the seat of my
trouble: it lay deeper than that. It arose, I think,
chiefly from two things: first, the sense of Anglican
isolation that had been forced upon my notice
abroad, and secondly from the strong case for Roman
continuity with the pre-Reformation Church and
the respective weakness of our own. I was reminded
again of these things during a month in which I
acted as Anglican chaplain at Cadenabbia. There
was one other circumstance, besides those I have
mentioned, which tended to increase my restless
ness.

A few miles away from us was a convent of Angli
can nuns whose outward practice was simply in
distinguishable from that of a Catholic nunnery.
On feasts unprovided for in the Prayer Book, such

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 55

as Corpus Christi and the Assumption, it became
the habit of certain clergy, both from London and
in the country round, to attend the sacred festivities
at this convent, and on half a dozen occasions I
also took part. The Roman Missal was used with
all its ceremonies; and on the Feast of Corpus Christi
a procession was formed according to the precise
directions of Baldeschi in every detail. An altar of
repose was set up in the beautiful garden and the
Pange Lingua sung. Now, these nuns were not
playing at the Religious Life: they recited the night
Office at night, according to the strictest observance
— using of course the monastic Breviary — and lived
a life of prayer in complete seclusion. But it was
impossible to persuade myself, though of course I
attempted to do so, that the atmosphere bore any
resemblance at all to that of the Church of England
in general. The public was not admitted to these
functions. I used to argue occasionally with the
chaplain, who, as well as his successor, preceded me
into the Catholic Church, criticizing certain details;
but his answers, given with considerable learning -
to the effect that, since the Church of England was
Catholic, she had a right to all Catholic privileges -
did not satisfy me; rather, the fact that Catholic
privileges were obviously alien to her character

56 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

seemed to imply that she was not Catholic; and I
am sure that these visits, almost more than any
thing else, began to emphasize to my mind the real
gulf that separated me from Catholic Christen
dom. I presented a silver lamp to the statue of
Our Lady in this convent (it still hangs there),
in a kind of endeavour to assert my Catholic
aspirations.

§ 8. So time went on and my restlessness with it.
I began to diagnose my own case. I told myself
that the life was too happy to be wholesome, and
I set about future plans. I had learned by this
time a certain effectiveness in preaching; I took
part in a parochial mission, and at last was invited
by the Canon Missioner of the diocese to join him
definitely in mission work. But I had begun to have
thoughts of the Religious Life, and was further dis
mayed to learn that, in the chapel of the house in
Canterbury which we proposed to take, there must
be no such ceremonial as that to which I had become
accustomed. Honestly, I do not think that I was a
mere "Ritualist," but it seemed to me evident that
faith and its expression should go together, and
that it would be an undue strain to preach a religion
whose obvious and inseparable adjuncts were want
ing. However, I decided to accept the invitation

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 57

and went to see Archbishop Temple on the subject-
He was quite kind and, after half an hour's conversa
tion, quite peremptory. I was declared to be too
young for such work, and I went back to Kemsing
resolved to offer myself to the Community of the
Resurrection, of whose fame I had heard again and
again.

Within a few weeks I had an interview with Dr.
Gore (now Bishop of Oxford) in his canon's house
at Westminster, and was definitely accepted as a
probationer. Dr. Gore was extremely kind and
sympathetic; he seemed to understand my aspira
tions, and I was deeply impressed both by his own
bearing and by the quiet religious atmosphere of the
house. It seemed to me now that all my troubles
were at an end. I was intensely excited and pleased
at the thought of the new life that was opening
before me, and it became easier than ever to treat all
Roman difficulties as diabolical temptations. I see
now that my attention was distracted and my im
agination filled with other visions; I was not really
settled. But when I went up to Birkenhead for the
annual retreat of the community with which my
probation was to begin, I can sincerely say that no
thought of henceforth ever leaving the Anglican
communion appeared conceivable. I was to be

58 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

launched in a new sea altogether; I was to live as
the friars had lived five hundred years ago; I was to
realize, though in an unexpected fashion, my old
dreams of Llandaff and Damascus; I was to dedicate
myself to God once and for all in the highest vocation
open to man.

Ill

§ i. It will be impossible for me ever to acknowl
edge adequately the debt of gratitude which I owe
to the Community of the Resurrection, or the ad
miration which I always felt, and still feel, toward
their method and spirit. All that it is possible to
describe is the external aspect of their life and to
hint only at the deep Christian charity and brotherli-
ness and devotion that existed beneath it. It is
true that they will not allow me to go and stay with
them again as I should like to do, but individually,
they are all most friendly, and, indeed such a visit
might perhaps be really painful to them. At the
same time one must reflect that for an Anglican to
become a Catholic is, even from the point of view of
his old friends, a very different thing from the
opposite process. For when a Catholic leaves the
Church, those from whom he separates himself
regard him as one who has left the Fold of Christ
for the wilderness. It does not at all signify to what
other body he may attach himself : he has left what
his friends hold to be the One Body of Christ. But

60 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

when a High Churchman becomes a Catholic, on
the Anglican theory all that he has done is to have
transferred himself from one part of the Church to
another; on the "Branch" theory, he has only
shifted from one bough to the other; on the "Pro
vince" theory, to use yet more recent phraseology,
he has only detached himself from Canterbury, not
from the Church of Christ, as Anglicans understand
it. It is true that he has, to their mind, become
"schismatic"; worse, he has denied the validity of
the Orders he once accepted; but it is impossible for
his friends to regard him as an apostate in the simple
sense of the word, and, to do them justice, they very
seldom ever pretend do so. Certainly the Mirfield
Brethren have never manifested to me in any way
at all such an unjust discourtesy.

Next, before proceeding to give some account of
the life we lived there, I must remark that I shall
describe no more of the Life and Rule than could be
observed by any visitor who stayed in the house.
Every family has its "secrets," its little intimate
ways and methods of life — I mean no more than
that — and it would not be decent or loyal of me
to treat of these. This inner domestic life, our
relations with one another, our tone and atmosphere,
were, I presume to think, singularly sweet and

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 61

Christian. I suppose there must have been diffi
culties now and again, inseparable from the mutual
intimacy of so many and various temperaments;
but of those I have no remembrance at all. I
remember only the extraordinary kindness and
generosity that I always received.

§ 2. We lived in a great house standing in its own
gardens, at the top of a hill above the valley of the
Calder. It was a somewhat smoky country; there
were tall chimneys visible all round us, but the land
that belonged to the house prevented any sensation
of being pressed upon or crowded. Our external
life was a modification of the old Religious Rules
and resembled, so far as I understand, a kind of com
bination of the Redemptorist and the Benedictine.
Some of the Brethren were engaged almost entirely
in scholars' work — the editing of liturgical, hymnal,
expository, and devotional works, and for the use of
these there was a large library of about fifteen
thousand volumes. The rest, who were the majority,
spent about half the year in prayer and study at
home, and the rest of it in evangelistic and mission
work.

Our life ran on very simple and practical lines.
We rose about a quarter past six and went at once
to the chapel for Morning Prayer with the psalms

62 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

of Prime, and the Communion service; at eight we
breakfasted; at a quarter to nine we said Terce and
made a meditation. Until ten minutes past one we
worked in the library or our own rooms; then, after
Sext and intercessions, we dined. In the afternoon
we took exercise — walking or gardening; at half-
past four we said None and had tea. We worked
again until seven, when we sang Evensong; we
supped at the half hour, and, after a little recreation
and work for an hour or two, we said Compline at a
quarter to ten and went to our rooms. On Saturday
mornings a chapter was held, at which, all kneeling,
made a public confession of external breaches of the
rule.

The community life was, when I first went there,
in a somewhat transitional state: the Brethren were
feeling their way in the direction of greater strictness;
and by the time that I left them, four years later, a
considerable development had taken place toward a
more completely Religious character. Silence, for
example, was extended gradually, until at last we
did not speak from Compline in the evening until
dinner the next day; manual work for so many hours
a week was made an absolute rule; we broke up and
carried coal, cleaned our own boots, and made our
beds. My last manual task at Mirfield was the

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 63

cutting and building of steps in the quarry that
adjoined the house. Here I worked each afternoon
and revolved meanwhile my interior difficulties.
The dress of the community, which was at first
rather nondescript, developed more or less stead
ily in the direction of a habit, consisting of a
double-breasted cassock girded with a leather belt.
Originally, too, the head of the community was
commonly addressed as "Senior," but when Dr. Gore
was appointed Bishop of Birmingham and a new
principal was elected, this title was supplanted by
that of "Superior." The title "Father," which was
at first somewhat discouraged, became later almost
universal, although one or two members still disliked
its significance. These changes, which the majority,
including myself, ardently desired, were not carried
out without protest on the part of three or four
members; and, although nothing resembling bitter
ness ever made its appearance, one Brother at any
rate found himself compelled to withdraw at last
at the time of the annual renewal of vows.

It is more difficult to explain these vows. Mr.
George Russell delivered more than one genial
blow at them in the "Cornhill Magazine" and
elsewhere. We were supposed to pledge ourselves
to celibacy only until such time as we wanted to

64 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

marry. Roughly speaking, the probation lasted
normally for one full year — from July to July -
after which, if the probationer received the votes of
the community, he made his profession. This con
sisted of an absolute promise to observe the rule of
the community for thirteen months, and an expres
sion of his deliberate intention to remain in it for life.
Profession, therefore, was not in the least of the
nature of a mere experiment: it meant practically a
life intention, though an escape was provided if the
life for any reason became intolerable. The Rule it
self was built upon the vows of poverty, chastity, and
obedience, all three of which were integrally woven
into it. The life was less rigid, therefore, than that
of the ordinary Catholic Orders, but more rigid than
that of such Congregations as the Oratorian.

We numbered at that time about fourteen mem
bers, all of whom were in the full Orders of the Church
of England, and all of whom had had experience of
parish work. We had no lay-brothers, but the neces
sary household duties which we did not do ourselves
were done by three or four servants. Now, however,
the numbers of the community have risen to between
twenty and thirty; a large College of the Resurrec
tion has been built in the grounds for the education
of poor men for the ministry; a hostel has been

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 65

opened in Leeds and a community house in Johannes
burg; lay-brothers also, I understand, have been tried
as an experiment. A chapel also, I believe, is in
course of erection; but while I was there we used a
large room in the house, very skilfully and beautifully
adapted for worship. Our worship was really digni
fied and devotional, but did not in its ritual rise above
the ordinary level of the Anglo- Catholic party in
general. We used vestments, at first of linen, but
later, first by means of a gift made through me to
the community, we began to substitute coloured
vestments. We used incense unceremonially, in
accordance with the Lambeth "opinions," and for
our music sang, for the most part, unaccompanied
plain-song adapted to the Book of Common Prayer.
Frankly, we did not sing well, but we did our best;
and I shall not easily forget the sense of beauty and
mystery at our sung celebrations early on Sunday
mornings. The altar was on the approved English
type with "riddels"; two candles stood upon the
altar, two more upon the posts of the curtains, and
two more in standards. We had a sanctuary lamp,
which I always disliked, since it did not signify any
thing in particular.

§ 3. It is impossible to describe the happiness
which I enjoyed at Mirfield. For about one year I

£

66 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

did very little external preaching and busied myself
almost entirely in theological study and prayer.
My "novice master'7 was a sympathetic and com
petent guide of souls and, although I did not go to
Confession to him, I always felt that he was able
and willing to help me. For a while there was only
one other probationer besides myself — an Irishman
of great eloquence and fervour, who developed into
an extremely capable mission-preacher, but who,
later, left the community and married. We were
thrown together a great deal, and I found in him an
open enthusiasm of faith and confidence in the
Church of England (alternating with depressions,
however) which did much to reassure my own.

When the time of my profession drew near, how
ever, I began somewhat to distrust my suitability
for the life. It was not that I was troubled with
Roman difficulties, for these had practically vanished;
but, owing to a certain resolution passed by the
community in view of a crisis in the Church of
England, I began to think that my position was too
"advanced" for my contentment in the house. By
this time I had learned to hold practically all the
dogmas of the Catholic Church except that of the
Pope's Infallibility. I studied and analyzed Lehm-
kuhl's "Moral Theology," omitting as irrelevant all

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 67

sections dealing with the Supreme Pontiff. I said
my Rosary regularly; I invoked the saints; I thought
that the word " Transubstantiation " best expressed
the reality of Our Lord's presence in the Sacrament;
I held that Penance was the normal means by which
post-baptismal mortal sin was remitted; I used the
word "Mass" freely at home. These doctrines, too,
I preached in veiled language, and found that by
them, and them alone, could I arouse the enthusiasm
of congregations — these doctrines, at least, set
forth round the adorable Person of Christ, which,
remembering the lessons of "John Inglesant," I
endeavoured to make the centre of my teaching.
I remember, for example, being told once by an
indignant curate that my doctrine seemed "a mixture
of Romanism and Wesleyanism" -an accusation
that brought me the greatest satisfaction. The
community in general, on the other hand, seemed to
me at that time to be over-cautious, to desire to
dissociate themselves from the extreme party in the
Church of England; and it was to this party that I
now belonged.

The end was that I postponed my profession for
one year, in order to test myself yet further. But
that year removed my difficulties. I began to be
more and more encouraged in mission-work and "to

68 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

find that my quiet life at Mirfield gave me a power
that I could obtain in no other way. It is hard for
Catholics to believe it, but it is a fact that as an
Anglican I had far longer hours in the confessional
than I have ever had in the Catholic Church, though,
of course, this is to be accounted for by the fact that
since becoming a Catholic I have never preached a
regular mission. In one London parish, for instance,
for about four days at the end of a mission, my
brother-missioner and I interviewed people, hearing
confessions and recommending resolutions and rules
of life, for over eleven hours each day; two more
hours were occupied in delivering sermons to vast
congregations.

This, however, was after my profession. Yet
everywhere it seemed as if an immense work was
waiting to be done. We came from our quiet life
red-hot with zeal and found everywhere men and
women who seemed to have been waiting for us in
an extraordinary manner. We saw conversions
everywhere; we saw sinners changed by the power
of God, children enkindled and taught, the luke
warm set on fire, and the obstinate broken down.
It was impossible to doubt that the grace of God
was at work here; and if the Church of England was
capable of being used as a vessel of so much honour,

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 69

why any longer need one doubt of her divine mis
sion? And since that was so, and since also I had
found such extreme happiness and inspiration in
the life at Mirfield, why should I any longer hesi
tate to commit myself to it?

§ 4. Before my profession I was asked by Dr.
Gore, greatly to my surprise, whether I was in any
danger of lapsing to Rome. I honestly told him
"No, so far as I could see," and in July, 1901, I
took the step without alarm. It was an extraor
dinarily happy day. I obtained a new cassock for
the purpose, which, strangely enough, I am wear
ing at this moment, adapted to the Roman cut.
My mother came up and was present in the tiny
ante-chapel. I was formally installed; my hand
was kissed by the brethren; I pronounced my vows
and received Communion as a seal and pledge of
stability. In the afternoon I drove out with my
mother in a kind of ecstasy of contentment.

Then once more I set to work. I think the
most trying part of my external work lay in the
strange varieties of doctrine and ceremonial with
which I became acquainted. As a rule, of course,
we were asked to conduct missions only in parishes
where our standard of belief and preaching was
accepted. (We were not, I believe, however, re-

70 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

garded as quite satisfactory by the extreme party
of Ritualists, and this, no doubt, was partly owing
to Dr. Gore's position. He was identified, rightly
or wrongly, with the High Liberal School; he was
supposed to be unsound on the doctrine of the In
carnation; his views on Higher Criticism were
considered dangerous; he was thought a little
extravagant on the subject of Christian Socialism.
And all this, of course, was a certain distress to me,
since on those three points I was not at all one of
his disciples.) But what was far more trying was
my experience of less advanced churches where I
gave an occasional sermon, and where the clergy
man did not feel that the merely passing presence
of a "Brother" would compromise him irreparably.
Here, as well as in the three churches of Mirfield,
which we attended as we liked on Sunday evenings,
I found all kinds of teaching and ceremonial. In one
church they would wear elaborate stoles but no
vestments, with doctrine to correspond; in another,
vestments would be used at services to which the
important Protestants did not come; teaching on
the Real Presence would be skilfully veiled, and
Penance would be referred to in a hasty aside as
the "Sacrament of reconciliation," or taught ex
plicitly only to a favoured few at some small guild

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 71

service. And, of course, it must be remembered
that even so we did not experience a tenth of the
further divisions and schools of thought in the
Church of England — divisions of which, however,
it was impossible to be ignorant.

It was easy after a little experience to diagnose,
almost at a glance at the clergyman or his church,
the exact doctrinal level of the teaching given;
and in less advanced places it was my custom to
preach the love of Jesus Christ or the joy of peni
tence or the Fatherhood of God with all the fervour
I had, in the hope that these truths would find their
normal outcome some day in those who heard me.
On the only occasion on which I preached in West
minster Abbey I put all my energies into attempting
to set forth the Person of Jesus Christ as the centre
of all religion, leaving all other doctrines to take
care of themselves. I was not as courageous as
another member of the community, who, in the
same circumstances, denounced the "dead altars "
of that place of worship! But this was all very
unsatisfactory, and gradually, no doubt, though I
did not realize it at the time, began to shake my
confidence once more in the Church of England as
a Divine Teacher. I used to hurry back to Mir-
field as to a refuge; for there at least there was

72 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

peace and tolerable unanimity. My intellectual
escape from the difficulty seemed to me, however,
quite convincing. It was as follows.

§5. Originally, as a "Moderate High Church
man," I had held that the Church of England, in
her appeal and in her supposed resemblance to the
" Primitive" Church, was the most orthodox body
in Christendom; that Rome and the East on the
one side had erred through excess; and the Non
conformist bodies on the other through defect, and
these, further, through their loss of episcopal succes
sion, had forfeited any corporate place in the Visible
Body of Christ. But this doctrinal position had long
ago broken down under me. First, I had seen the
impossibility of believing that for about a thousand
years the promises of Christ had failed — between,
that is, the fifth or sixth century and the Reforma
tion period — and that corruption during all this
space of time had marred the original purity of the
Gospel. Next, I had begun to perceive that in
the Church of Christ there must be some Living
Voice which, if not actually infallible, must at least
be taken to be such — some authoritative person
or Council who could pass judgment upon new
theories and answer new questions. I had at
tempted, strangely enough, to find this Living

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 73

Voice in the Book of Common Prayer and the
Articles — to seek in them, that is to say, a final
immediate interpreter of remote Primitive and
Apostolic Faith. But now I had learned the fallacy
of such an attempt, since even these formularies
could be, and were, taken in completely divergent
senses: the Ritualist, for instance, finds that the
Prayer Book Catechism teaches the Objective and
Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament, and the
Low Churchman claims it as teaching Receptionism.
Then, when I had looked despairingly to the only
elements in the Church of England which bear any
resemblance at all to a Living Voice — the decisions
of Convocation, the resolutions of Pan-Anglican
Conferences, and the utterances of Bishops — I
found, either that these were divided amongst
themselves, or that they refused to answer, or, at
the worst, that they answered in a manner which
I could not reconcile with what I was convinced
was the Christian Faith. The "Moderate High
Church" theory, then, had broken down so far as
I was concerned, and I had been forced, it seemed
to me, both by logic and the pressure of circum
stances, to seek some other theory as the founda
tion of my faith. This I found, for the time, in the
Ritualistic School. It was as follows.

74 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

The Catholic Church, I now premised, con
sisted of those bodies of Christians retaining
the Catholic Creeds and the Apostolic ministry.
Roughly speaking, these comprised Rome, Moscow,
and Canterbury, together with a few detached
bodies, such as the "Old Catholics," of whom I
knew very little. This "Catholic Church," there
fore, did have a speaking voice of a kind : she spoke
through her silent consensus. Where Rome, Mos
cow, and Canterbury agreed, there was the explicit
voice of the Holy Spirit; where they dogmatically
disagreed, there was the field for private opinion.
Now Canterbury occasionally faltered in her wit
ness, but it was at least arguable, I thought, that
she had never spoken positive heresy. (I explained
away the statements of the Thirty-Nine Articles
in the manner familiar to Anglican controversialists.)
Therefore, where Canterbury was silent, her sense
must be taken to be that of the rest of "Catholic
Christendom." This was a very convenient theory,
for by it I was able to embrace practically all the
doctrines of the Catholic Church proper, except
that of Papal Infallibility and the concurrent neces
sity of external communion with Rome; and I was
able to feel that I had behind me the silent toleration,
though not necessarily the explicit authority, of my

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 75

own communion; and, what was far weightier, the
authority of Christ's Church as a whole.

It will be seen, then, that I had travelled far from
the old Tractarian position of the appeal to the
Ancient Undivided Church. On the contrary, di
visions made no difference to me; schism was prac
tically impossible so long as the Apostolic ministry
and Creeds were maintained; and I had travelled
even farther from my old East London position of
believing that the Church of England was the sound
core of a rotten tree. When, therefore, again in the
course of these papers I shall have occasion to refer
to this theory of mine — which, as a matter of
fact, held me altogether now until it broke beneath
me suddenly — I shall call it by the name of the
"Diffusive Theory." In its shadow I invoked
saints, having little pictures of them, drawn by
myself, with a statue of Our Lady; adored Christ
in His Sacrament, and, indeed, began to learn for
the first time a real spirit of Catholic submission.
If once a doctrine could be proposed to me with the
authority of the Church Diffusive behind it, I should
set aside all my predispositions and accept it whole
heartedly.

For a while I was puzzled somewhat to interpret
to myself the manner by which this authority actu-

76 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

ally did speak to the unlearned who were incapable
of research into what was or was not covered by the
theory; but gradually I evolved an idea. As the
unlearned Roman Catholic layman applies to a
clergyman who acknowledges the authority of the
Roman Pontiff and is in communion with him, so
the unlearned layman of the Church Diffusive should
apply to a clergyman who acknowledged the author
ity of the Church Diffusive; and it is perfectly
true that if such laymen actually did so, they would,
as a matter of fact, find a very tolerable unanimity.
In one of my last struggles in 1903 I did propose
this view, as a possible escape, to my Superior; but
I was told that it was impossible. Neither then nor
now do I understand why; for, granted the first
theory, the application of it seems the only logical
or practical conclusion.

§ 6. There, then, I settled down for nearly two
years as a professed member of the community,
during about one year extremely happy and con
fident — except once or twice when my old difficul
ties suddenly recurred for a while and then left me
again — finding, as I have said before, a brother-
liness and companionship that is beyond apprecia
tion. Still, in my dreams sometimes I am back at
Mirfield, though never, thank God, as an Anglican!

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 77

Once, I remember, Cardinal Merry del Val had been
appointed Superior and had received the submission
of the community, and I, too, was back there, happy
and exultant, standing in the library and laughing
with pure joy. Once I was there, I thought, as a
Catholic priest, and found that, although there
should have been a barrier of shyness between the
community and myself, there was none. We stood
together in the hall and talked as four years ago.
Yet I never have been back there, although I should
like to go for a visit, even without the Cardinal;
but the community judges otherwise. It was here,
too, that I first began to systematize my devotion
and to attempt the art of meditation, and it was
here that God rewarded me abundantly for my poor
efforts. He was preparing me, as I see now very
well, for the great decision that He was to set before
me so soon.

IV

§ i. I think that it was in the summer and au
tumn of 1902 that I began to write a book called
"The Light Invisible." Some stories of my eldest
brother's had put the idea into my mind, and I
began to write these little by little, as I had time.
The stories, which are of a semi-mystical and imagi
native nature, centre round a man whom I call a
"Catholic priest," and I have been asked again and
again whether I intended this man to be a Catholic
or an Anglican. My only answer is that I intended
him to be neither in particular. My theory of the
Church Diffusive more and more drove me to oblit
erate, in my thoughts as well as m my preaching,
any distinction between what I believed to be merely
various parts of Christ's mystical Body, and in the
"Light Invisible," accordingly, I aimed deliberately
at the water-line. For by this time, too, my dif
ficulties were once more recurring, so I tried not to
indicate by the slightest hint the communion to
which my hero belonged. This I see now to have
been more significant than I realized at the time:

8o CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

I did not have that supreme confidence in the
Church of England which would naturally have
made me content to call him an Anglican and have
done with it.

Before, during, and after the writing of this book
I was more and more becoming interested in mystical
lines of thought. I put away from me the contem
plation of cold-cut dogma and endeavoured to clothe
it with the warm realities of spiritual experience;
and in the book itself I attempted to embody dogma
rather than to express it explicitly. I have been
asked whether any of the stories were "true," and
to that I have no answer except that the book itself
does not claim to be anything other than fiction.
I think that to some extent I must have been success
ful in hitting the water-line between Catholicism and
Anglicanism, since the book still sells well both
among Catholics and Anglicans. Yet I was un
doubtedly still deeply affected by Anglicanism; for
when I wrote a story in the book about a nun's
praying before the Blessed Sacrament, I had in my
mind an Anglican convent which I knew, and was
staying at the time in the clergy house of St.
Cuthbert's, Kensington, where the Sacrament is
reserved. Yet at the same time I remember dis
sociating myself internally from any actual self-

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 81

committing as to what I intended; it was not that
I at all disbelieved in Anglican Orders at that time,
yet I never felt that the repudiation of them would
be a serious obstacle to my submission to the
Church. J

§ 2. The popularity of the book — or rather, the
classes of persons who, respectively, like and dislike
the book — appears to me rather significant. It still
sells very considerably amongst Anglicans; and, to
a very much lesser degree, among Catholics. It is,
of course, also perfectly natural that a certain type
of Anglican should enjoy shaking his head over my
sad deterioration, both literary and spiritual, since
I left the Church of England; but, even apart from
this controversial device, it is quite true that Angli
cans, as a class, prefer it infinitely to anything else
that I have ever written; while most Catholics,
and myself amongst them, think that "Richard
Raynal, Solitary" is very much better written and
very much more religious. In fact, for myself, I
dislike, quite intensely, "The Light Invisible," from
the spiritual point of view. I wrote it in moods of
great feverishness and in what I now recognize as
a very subtle state of sentimentality; I was striving
to reassure myself of the truths of religion, and
assumed, therefore, a positive and assertive tone that

82 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

was largely insincere; the very careful, trimmed
style of the book is an evidence of this. Further,
it is, I think, rather a mischievous book in very dis
tinct ways, since it implies that what I then strove
to believe was spiritual intuition — and what is
really nothing but imagination — must be an inte
gral element in religious experience; and that "sight"
-or rather personal realization — must be the
mode of spiritual belief rather than the simple faith
of a soul that receives divine truth from a divine
authority. The Catholic atmosphere is, on the
other hand, something quite apart from all this.
For Catholics it is almost a matter of indifference
as to whether or no the soul realizes, in such a
manner as to be able to visualize, the facts of revela
tion and the principles of the spiritual world: the
point is that the Will should adhere and the Rea
son assent. But for Anglicans, whose theology is
fundamentally unreasonable, and amongst whom
Authority is, really, non-existent, it becomes natural
to place the centre of gravity rather in the Emotions,
and to "mistake/7 therefore, as Mrs. Craigie says
somewhere, "the imagination for the soul." The
Reason, for them, must be continually suppressed
even in its own legitimate sphere; the Will must be
largely self-centred. There remains then, for them,

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 83

the experience of feeling, only, as the realm in which
spirituality operates. My own rather exaggerated
dislike of the book, arises, I suppose, from a reaction
against these unrealities amongst which I lived for
so long.

§ 3. Here, although it is something of an anach
ronism, I should like to explain how I managed
to hold the apparently unsatisfactory position of
believing in Anglican Orders and yet contemplating
with equanimity the time when I might have to
repudiate them. Later on, when matters were
serious, my Superior told me that he could not
understand it; that I appeared to be indifferent
to spiritual experience; that it was a terrible thing
for me to contemplate repudiating all the graces
which I had received and bestowed through the
Sacraments of the Church of England. Yet,
honestly, I did not find it a burden.

The way I expressed it to myself was this. There
are two things in the reception of grace — the
fact and the mode. The fact is a matter of spiritual
intuition; the mode, of intellectual apprehension.
As regarded the former — the actual communica
tions between Our Lord and my soul — granted
above all at moments of great solemnity, I neither
had nor have the slightest doubt. Without any sort

84 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

of hesitation I still say that the times of Commun
ion in the chapel at Mirfield and elsewhere, and
of Anglican Confession, will always be among the
most sacred of my life; to deny reality to them would
be indeed to betray Our Lord and repudiate His
love. But the mode is quite another matter.
While I was in the Church of England I accepted,
practically to the very end, her authoritative state
ment that I was a priest, and the consequent deduc
tion that the grace of her ordinances was actually
sacramental. But when I submitted to Rome, I
accepted with far greater security, with an internal
as well as an external consent, her authoritative
statement that I never was a priest at all. She has
never asked me to repudiate anything else on the
subject or to assert anything so entirely blasphe
mous and absurd as that which Anglicans occasion
ally pretend of her — namely, the diabolical or even
illusive nature of the grace that God bestows on
those who are in good faith. In my Confessions
in the Church of England I, at any rate, made acts
of contrition and did my best to comply with the
Sacrament of Penance; in my Communions I lifted
up my heart toward the Bread of Life; and, there
fore, Our Lord could not be the Rewarder of those
that seek Him if He had not visited me in response.

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 85

All this, I think, I saw quite plainly long before
my submission was imminent; and the fact that
I was told, upon explaining, that I was splitting
hairs, did not trouble me. I understood that a
hair's breadth is sometimes a great distance. About
Jurisdiction I neither knew nor cared anything.

§ 4. In the summer of 1902 I told my mother,
in a walk, that I had had Roman difficulties, but
that they were gone again; and at the same time
I promised her that, should they recur, I would
tell her at once. Sometime between that and
Christmas I had to redeem my promise. I can
never feel enough gratitude that I did so, and that
she received my confidence in the way that she did.
I kept both her and my Superior informed of every
step of the process through which I went, and
carried out their recommendations to the letter;
I read all the books I was given on the Anglican
side, and consulted all the living authorities proposed
to me. Both my mother and my Superior treated
me throughout with the utmost kindness and con
sideration. Even from secondary motives I am
thankful that I acted as I did; for both of them,
when my submission had taken place and, as usually
happens in such cases, a flood of accusations as
regarded underhandedness and deceit poured in,

86 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

informed their correspondents that such accusations
were entirely untrue.

§ 5. I think it must have been in the October
of this year that I reached such a pitch of distress
that, with my Superior's permission, I wrote to a
distinguished priest an account of all my difficulties.
(I will presently try to indicate what they were.)
His answer was very surprising to me then. It is
less surprising to me now, since the priest in ques
tion has, finally, died out of Catholic communion.
He defined for me very carefully the doctrine of
Papal Infallibility and the exact sense put upon it
by the general feeling of the Church and advised
me to wait. He told me — what I have since found
to be not the case — that while the "minimizers"
seemed to have been victorious as regards the
wording of the Vatican decree upon Papal Infalli
bility, it was the "maximizers" who had been win
ning ever since; and he added that although he
himself, as a "minimizer," felt himself individually
justified in remaining where he was, he would not
feel himself justified in officially receiving anyone
into the Church except on the terms that now pre
vailed, viz., on "maximizing" principles: he added
that "maximizing " views were impossible to persons
of reason. The conclusion, therefore, practically,

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 87

was that I had better remain where I was. One
sentence in his letter gave me, I think, an inkling
into the objective disloyalty of his position: I had
asked him to remember me in his Mass and, in return,
he begged to be remembered in mine. After my
reception into the Church he wrote to me again,
asking how I had surmounted the difficulty
which he had indicated. I answered by saying
that I could not be deterred by such elaborate
distinctions from uniting myself to what I was
convinced was the divinely appointed centre of Unity
and that I had simply accepted the Decree in the
sense in which the Church herself had uttered and
accepted it.

For a little while, however, his first letter quieted
and reassured me, and I was only too willing to
be reassured. My Superior, too, remarked that I
could not very well have a plainer indication of
God's Will that I should remain in the communion
where He had placed me. The very fact that I had
written to a priest and received an answer of dis
couragement seemed to me then — and to him still,
I imagine — an evident sign of where my duty lay.
It seemed to show too that even within the Roman
Church wide divergences of opinion prevailed, and
that there was not there that Unity for which I had

88 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

looked. The ultimate history of the priest in ques
tion, his excommunication, and his death outside the
Church showed, of course, that such is not the case,
and that men are not allowed to represent the
Church who misrepresent, even in good faith, her
teaching.

I was reassured, then, for only a very little while.
Almost immediately my doubts recurred. I had
preaching engagements that would naturally occupy
me most of the winter, and these were now imminent.
I asked leave to withdraw from them, but my
Superior thought it better not; and, looking back
upon it, it seems to me now that the best chance of
silencing the clamour of my ideas did indeed lie in
active work.

I preached a mission or two and returned to
Mirfield; I went home for Christmas and once more
came back to the Community. By this time I was
really in sore distress. I had even asked a recent
convert, lately ordained priest, and a great friend of
mine, who came to stay at my mother's house in
November, to pray for me, and I had put one or
two difficulties to him to see what he would answer.
But my distress quieted again ever so little in the
atmosphere of Mirfield, and once more I was sent
out, very unwillingly, to preach a mission or two

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 89

and conduct Holy Week services and discourses in
a church in the south of England. On Good Friday
I preached the "Three Hours," and on Easter Day
evening for the last time I stood in an Anglican
pulpit and preached on the appearance of Our Lord
to the penitent Magdalene. As I came down the
steps at the end, I think I knew what would happen.
I then returned to Mirfield, exhausted physically,
mentally, and spiritually.

§ 6. It does not seem to me that Catholic con
troversialists as a body in the least realize what
Anglicans have to go through before they can make
their submission. I am not speaking of external
sufferings — of the loss of friends, income, position,
and even the barest comforts of life. From such
losses as these I was spared, though it is true that
the leaving of the Community was about the most
severe external trial I have ever undergone — I
kissed, in Greek fashion, the doorposts of my room
as I left it for the last time; yet I did not, I think,
lose the personal friendship of the individual mem
bers; I still see them occasionally and hear from
them. I mean rather the purely internal conflict.
One is drawn every way at once; the soul aches as
in intolerable pain; the only relief is found in a kind
of passionless Quietism. To submit to the Church

90 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

seems, in prospect, to be going out from the familiar
and the beloved and the understood into a huge,
heartless wilderness, where one will be eyed and
doubted and snubbed. Certainly that is largely
an illusion; yet it is, I think, the last emotional
snare spread by Satan; and I think that he is occa
sionally aided in spreading it by the carelessness
of Catholic controversialists.

Two incidents of the kind very nearly put out
the dawning light of faith in me altogether. I will
not describe them, but in both cases it was a careless
sentence snapped out by a good, sincere priest in a
public discourse. When a soul reaches a certain pitch
of conflict, it ceases to be absolutely logical; it is
rather a very tender, raw thing, with all its fibres
stretched to agony, shrinking from the lightest
touch, desiring to be dealt with only by Hands that
have been pierced. Then it is handled roughly,
pushed this way and that by a man who under
stands nothing, who lives in a bright light toward
which the sensitive soul of the convert is reaching
out with unutterable pain. Is it any wonder that
again and again the miserable thing creeps back
into the twilight sooner than bear any more, believ
ing that a half-light with charity must be nearer
to God's Heart than the glare of a desert? . . .

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 91

§ 7. Now, intellectually considered, the outline
of my difficulties was as follows — I have written
out the arguments that especially prevailed with me
in a little pamphlet which I published soon after
my submission — and it was on these subjects in
particular that, ever since the October of the pre
vious year, I had read steadily and swiftly when
ever I had an opportunity. Now once more I
gave myself up entirely to reading and prayer.

First, there was the general, and what I may call
the ideal, conception of God's plan. Secondly,
there were the actual realistic facts about me in the
world. Let me take the second first, since the
second was prior in time, though not in importance
to my mind. The facts were as follows:

I accepted Christianity as the Revelation of God.
This was my axiom which I am not concerned now
to defend. I accepted, too, the Bible as an inspired
and a divinely safeguarded record of the facts of
this Revelation. But I had come to see, as I have
already explained, the need of a Teaching Church
to preserve and to interpret the truths of Chris
tianity to each succeeding generation. It is only a
dead religion to which written records are sufficient;
a living religion must be able to adapt itself to
changing environment without losing its own iden-

92 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

tity. One thing, therefore, is absolutely certain —
that if Christianity is, as I believe it, a real Revela
tion, the Teaching Church must at any rate know
her own mind with regard to the treasure committed
to her care, and supremely on those points on which
the salvation of her children depends. She may be
undecided and permit divergent views on purely
speculative points; she may allow her theologians,
for instance, to argue, unchecked, for centuries as
to the modes by which God acts, or as to the best
philosophical terms for the elucidation of mysteries,
or as to the precise limits of certain of her own
powers and the manners of their exercise. But in
things that directly and practically affect souls -
with regard to the fact of grace, its channels, the
things necessary for salvation, and the rest — she
must not only know her mind, but must be constantly
declaring it, and no less constantly silencing those
who would obscure or misinterpret it.

Now this was not at all the case with the Com
munion in which I found myself.

I was an official of a church that did not seem to
know her own mind even on matters directly con
nected with the salvation of the soul. It was my
duty to preach and practise the system of redemp
tion which God had given through the life and death

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 93

of Jesus Christ, and that system I knew very well
to be a sacramental one. Yet when I looked about
me for a clear statement as to that system I did not
find it. It was true that many individuals taught
and accepted what I did; there were societies to
which I belonged — the "English Church Union"
and the "Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament"
- that were practically unfaltering in these respects;
but it was impossible to say that the authorities
of my Church were equally clear. To take one
single vital point — the doctrine of Penance. I
was really ignorant as to whether or not it was per
missible to teach that this was, normally, essential
to the forgiveness of mortal sin. Practically all
the Bishops denied this, and a few of them denied
the power of absolution altogether. But, even
granting that my views were tolerated — which
really they were not in any authoritative way — the
fact that mutually exclusive views were also toler
ated was an evidence that mine were not enjoined.
I was teaching, at the best, my private opinion
upon a point that was still officially indefinite. I
was teaching as a certainty what was officially
uncertain. It was becoming, then, the clearer I
saw this, more and more impossible to say that the
Church of England required sacramental confession.

94 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

The way in which many clergy escape from this
dilemma is very simple. They appeal not to the
living voice of the Church of England, but to her
written formularies, and they explain those formu
laries in accordance with their own views. But I
was finding it hard to do this sincerely, because I
had begun to see that a written formulary can never
be decisive in a church where that formulary can
be taken in more than one sense — as it undoubtedly
is — and the authorities not only will not decide as
to which is the true sense, but actually tolerate
senses that are mutually exclusive. More and more
I was beginning to see the absolute need of a living
authority who can continue to speak as new interpre
tations of her former words contend for the mastery.
A church that appeals merely to ancient written
words can be no more at the best than an antiqua
rian society.

Of course I was told to be content with my own
interpretation; but that was impossible. My point
was that, since my interpretation was disputed,
I could not teach it as authoritative. Dr. Pusey
was held up to me, also Mr. Keble, and others.
But I said that I could not rest on the authority
of individuals however eminent, for there were
other individuals equally eminent who held oppos-

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 95

ing views. By one or two advisers I was told that
those points were unessential; that the main facts
of the Christian Creed were all that were absolutely
necessary, and that upon these the Anglican witness
was clear enough. My answer was that those points
were the most practical of all, that they concerned
not remote theological propositions, but the actual
details of Christian life. Might I or might I not
tell penitents that they were bound to confess their
mortal sins before Communion? This is only one
instance out of many, for on all sides were the same
questions. I saw round me a Church which, even if
tolerable in theory, was intolerable in practice. Her
children lived and died by tens of thousands actually
ignorant of what I believed to be the Catholic Gospel
- ignorant not merely through neglect, but through
the deliberate instruction of men who were as fully
accredited ministers as myself — children of hers,
too, who desired nothing more than to learn and
obey her precepts and who might have had every
opportunity of doing so.

Then on the other side there was the Church of
Rome. Now, I think I had heard at various times
all the theoretical or historical arguments that could
possibly be brought against her claims; but, re
garded practically, there was no question. Her

96 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

system worked. It might be that it worked me
chanically and superstitiously, but it was there. I
remember in a private conversation comparing the
rival systems to two differently laid fires. The
Anglican system was as a man applying a match
to a tumbled heap of fuel : where there was personal
zeal and sincerity, a flame certainly shot up, souls
were warmed and lighted; but when the personal
influence or the private "Catholic" views of the
individual clergymen were removed, all was left
as before. In the Roman system, however, it was
very different; there might be slackness and lack
of piety, but, at any rate, the fire burned quite
apart from the individual influence, because the
fuel was laid in order. Whether or no a priest was
careless or slothful or even lax in his private views
made no essential difference; his flock knew what
was necessary for salvation and how to obtain it.
The smallest Roman Catholic child knew precisely
how to be reconciled to God and to receive His
grace.

§ 8. Secondly, there was the question of Catholic
ity itself. The Anglican theory was simply bewil
dering, as I looked at it from a less provincial
standpoint. I had no notion as to who was the
rightful Bishop, say, of Zanzibar; it would depend,

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 97

I thought, chiefly on the question as to which Com
munion, the Roman or the Anglican, happened to
have landed first on the African coast! In fact,
Jurisdiction was represented to me as a kind of
pious race-game. In Ireland I knew very well that
I was in communion with persons who, according to
my personal views, were simply heretics, and out of
communion with persons who believed, so far as
practical religion went, exactly what I myself be
lieved. On the other hand, the Roman theory
was simplicity itself. "I am in communion," the
Romanist could say with St. Jerome, "with Thy
Blessedness — that is, with the Chair of Peter.
On this rock I know that the Church is built."
The Roman theory worked, the Anglican did not.

Yet, of course, these considerations did not settle
the question. Our Lord, I was told, spoke often in
mysteries; He refused to cut knots by direct and
simple answers. It might very well be that the
golden thread of His divine plan ran in these days
through tangled woods and undergrowth, and that
the plain highway was but the monument of man's
impatience and lack of faith.

On these points, then, though they predisposed
me toward the Catholic Church, it was necessary
to read a great deal. There were, besides, other

G

98 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

points flowing from them that needed elucidation.
How, for example, was it possible that dogmas
binding now should not have been binding a hundred
years ago? How about the Immaculate Conception
-which, as a matter of private opinion, I was
perfectly ready to accept — and Papal Infallibility?
And then, finally, after innumerable gropings,
there always remained the old vexed business of
the Petrine Texts and the patristic comments upon
them.

§ 9. This, then, I began to see more and more
overwhelmingly: that it is possible, from the huge
complications of history, philosophy, exegesis,
natural law, and the rest — and, in fact, every
single method of God's indications of His Will —
to make out a case for almost any theory under the
sun. The materials from which I was obliged, all
incompetent, to judge, were as a vast kaleidoscope
of colours. I might say that the main scheme was
red and that the rest were accidental, or that it was
blue or green or white. Each man, I perceived, had
a natural inclination to one theory and tended to
select it. It was certainly possible to make out a
claim for Anglicanism or the Papacy or Judaism
or the system of the Quakers. And on this, almost
despairing, I had to set to work. One thing, how-

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 99

ever, began to emerge ever so slowly; namely, that
intellect alone could prove very little. The puzzle
which God had flung to me consisted of elements
which needed for their solution not the head only,
but the heart, the imagination, the intuitions; in
fact, the entire human character had to deal with it.
It was impossible to escape wholly from natural
prejudice, but I must do my best. I must step
back a little from the canvas and regard the affair
as a whole, not bend over it with a measuring-rod
and seek to test the elusive ethereal whole by but
one faculty of my nature. Yet at the beginning
I only half-realized this and plunged, therefore,
blindly into the bewildering maze of controversy.

I should be sorry to have to make a complete
list of all the controversial works which I read
during the last eight months of my Anglican days.
I devoured everything I could find, on both sides.
I read Dr. Gore's books, Salmon on Infallibility,
Richardson, Pusey, Ryder, Littledale, Puller, Dar-
well Stone, Percival, Mortimer, Mallock, Rivington.
I studied with care a brilliant MS. book on
Elizabethan history; I made profuse notes; and,
supremely, I read Newman's "Development" and
Mozley's answer. I also looked up various points
in the Fathers, but with a kind of despair, since I

ioo CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

knew I was wholly incompetent to decide where
great scholars disagreed. I must confess that I
became bewildered and hopeless. Was it not better
for me to relinquish this dusty search and remain
peacefully where God's Providence had placed me?
After all, there had been an extraordinary revival
of Catholic life in the Church of England and I had,
from the nature of my mission work, been peculiarly
privileged to see its effects. Would it not be a kind
of sin against the Holy Ghost to turn my back on
the visibly solid work of grace, in search for what
might be no more than a brilliant phantom?

§ i. Gradually, however, three things drew out
of the clamouring mob of ideas and authors. The
first was a thought. It had been put to me by my
Superior that I was surely incurring the guilt of
pride in venturing to set up my opinion against the
views of men, such as Dr. Pusey or Mr. Keble —
men infinitely my superiors in goodness, learning,
and experience. They had been into all these
questions far more profoundly than I could ever
hope to go, and had come to the conclusion that the
claims of Rome were unjustified, and that the
Church of England was, at any rate, a part of
Christ's Church. And then I suddenly realized
clearly what I had only suspected before; namely,
that if the Church of Christ was, as I believed it to
be, God's way of salvation, it was impossible that
the finding of it should be a matter of shrewdness
or scholarship; otherwise salvation would be easier
for the clever and leisured than for the dull and
busy. As for the holiness of men like Dr. Pusey —
after all, "Christ came into this world to save sin-

102 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

ners." Two or three texts of Scripture began to burn
before me. " A highway shall be there," wrote Isaias ;
". . . the redeemed shall walk there. . . . The
wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein."
"A city set on a hill," said our Saviour, "cannot
be hid." Again: "Unless you . . . become as
little children, you cannot enter into the kingdom
of heaven." And again: "I thank Thee, Father,
because Thou hast hid these things from the wise
and prudent, and hast revealed them to little ones."

I cannot describe the relief that this thought gave
to me. I saw now that my intellectual difficulties
were not the real heart of the matter, and that I
had no right to be discouraged because I knew
myself to be immeasurably the inferior of others
who had decided against the cause that was
beginning to show itself to me as true. Humility
and singleness of motive, I saw now, were far more
important than patristic learning. I began, there
fore, more than ever to aspire towards these and to
throw myself upon God. I used, day after day, one
of the acts of humility in St. Ignatius's Spiritual
Exercises. In fact, I think that, owing to the
violence of the reaction, I was in a certain danger
of relapsing into Quietism.

But two books came to my rescue, and these

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 103

were respectively Newman's "Development" and
Mallock's "Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption."
Besides these, one of Father Carson's essays helped
me in the last stage — that dealing with the growth
of the Church from an embryonic condition to that
of manhood; for it was, perhaps, this line of thought
as much as any that especially solved my difficulties.
Finally, there was Mr. Spencer Jones's "England
and the Holy See" -a remarkable book, written
by a man who is still a clergyman of the Church of
England. These books, each in its way, helped me?
not indeed directly forward towards Faith — for
that was forming as independently of intellectual
effort as of emotional attraction — but by way of
breaking down on one side the definite difficulties
that stood between me and Rome, and on the other
the last remnants of theory that held me to the
Church of England. I now began to see dawning
clearly, like mountains through a mist, the outlines
of what I have called in the previous chapter the
general or ideal views of the two Communions that
claimed my allegiance.

§ 2. First, there was the general view of the
Church of England and her relations to Christen
dom, and this, as I have already said, rested now
entirely upon the theory of the "Church Diffusive."

io4 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

Now Mr. Mallock's book first stated this theory
with complete fairness and then demolished it ut
terly. As soon as I had finished his treatment of
the question, I laid down the book and gasped.
I knew, and told others that I knew, that I had no
more to say on the Anglican side. There was but
one hope left, and that, I thought, was impossible
for me now; namely, a relapse into that kind of
devout agnosticism on the subject of the Church,
which is the refuge of so many Anglican clergy at
the present day. But I think now that if the other
books I have mentioned had not, simultaneously,
disclosed to me the outline of the Catholic Church,
I should in all probability have fallen back upon
that agnosticism and remained where I was, reassur
ing myself, as so many do, by reflections upon the
tangled state of Church history and the positive
evidences that God was, after all, undoubtedly
working in the Anglican communion.

I need not describe at length Mr. Mallock's argu
ment, but, in a word, it was this: the theory of the
"Church Diffusive7' is made by Ritualists the foun
dation of their belief, but the "Church Diffusive"
rejects that theory; Rome, Moscow, and Canter
bury, though they may agree upon other points,
do not agree upon this. Therefore the authority

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 105

to which the appeal is made implicitly denies that
it is an authority at all. Therefore the whole
thing is illusive.

I have asked, both before and since my submis
sion to Rome, an answer to this argument and I
have never yet received one of any kind. One
learned and zealous Anglican could only say that
it was too logical to be true, and that the heart has
reasons which the head knows nothing of.

I began to turn now with more hope to the con
structive books. In Mr. Spencer Jones's work I
found an orderly systematization of the argument
that greatly helped me to clear my thoughts; in
Father Carson's essay I found a kind of brilliant
variation upon Newman's great theme. But it was
"The Development of Doctrine" that, like a magi
cian, waved away the last floating mists and let
me see the City of God in her strength and beauty.

§ 3. Finally and supremely, it was the reading
of the Scriptures that satisfied me as to the posi
tive claims of Rome. On all sides my friends told
me to study the Written Word of God, and, indeed,
it was the best advice that could have been given.
For both I and they accepted the Scriptures as the
inspired Work of God; they, in those Scriptures,
interpreted by what they believed to be the Church,

io6 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

found the support of their own views; I, since I
had lost belief in the Church to which I belonged,
or rather since I failed to hear from that Church
any positive interpretation at all, had nothing left
but Scripture. I might read controversy for ever
and fail to detect the human fallacies that might lie
on either side; at least I had better turn to those
writings in which confessedly there were none. So,
once more I turned to the New Testament, seeking
to find some thread that would hold all together,
some living authority to which the Scriptures
themselves might point, testing, above all, the claims
of that authority which on logical and human grounds
seemed to me the most consistent of all claims made
in Christendom — the claim of the occupier of
Peter's Chair to be the Teacher and Lord of all
Christians.

I have been told, of course, that I found that in
the New Testament which I had hoped to find; that
I had already accepted interiorly the claims of
Rome, and therefore forced myself to the conclu
sion that the Scriptures must support them too.
I was bidden to turn again to the theologians for the
interpretation of the Scripture — back again, in fact,
to that very tangle of witnesses who, on the whole,
seemed to me to support the Petrine position, and

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 107

whom I had, a little while ago, been advised to leave
for God's own Word. Yet what else could I do
except honestly to attempt to test by that divine
authority the sole claim that, alone in the whole of
Christendom, seemed to me consistent, reasonable,
historical, practical, satisfactory, and, from the
very nature of the case, intrinsically necessary?

Well, I need not say that I found that claim there
more evidently and easily than I could find many
other doctrines which none the less I readily accepted
on Scriptural authority. Dogmas such as that of
the Blessed Trinity, sacraments such as that of
Confirmation, institutions such as that of Episco
pacy — all these things can indeed, to the Anglican
as well as the Catholic mind, be found in Scripture
if a man will dig for them. But the Petrine claim
needs no digging: it lies like a great jewel, blazing
on the surface, when once one has rubbed one's
eyes clear of anti-Catholic predisposition. The
"One Foundation" declares that on " Cephas" He
will build His Church: the Good Shepherd bids
the same Cephas, even after he has forfeited, it
might seem, all claims on his Lord, to "feed his
sheep"; the "Door" gives to Peter the "Keys."
In all I found twenty-nine passages of Scripture -
since then I have found a few more — in which the

io8 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

Petrine prerogative is at any rate implied, and I
found not one contrary to or incompatible with its
commission. I published these in a small pamphlet
soon after my submission.1

It is, of course, utterly impossible to lay my
finger upon this or that argument as the one that
finally convinced me. Besides, it was not argument
that did convince me, any more than it was emotion
that impelled me. It was rather my being drawn
by the Spirit of God towards a vantage ground
whence I could look out and see the facts as they
were; but it was Newman's book that pointed me
to the facts, led my eye from this point to that, and
showed me how the whole glorious erection stood
upon the unshakeable foundation of the Gospel
and soared to heaven.

§ 4. There, then, to change the metaphor, I saw
the mystical Bride of Christ, growing through the
ages from the state of childhood to adolescence,
increasing in wisdom and stature, not adding to
but developing her knowledge, strengthening her
limbs, stretching out her hands; changing, indeed,
her aspect and her language — using now this set
of human terms, now that, to express better and
better her mind; bringing out of her treasures things

1 "A City Set on a Hill." Catholic Truth Society.

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 109

new and old, which yet had been hers from the
beginning, indwelt by the Spirit of her Spouse, and
even suffering as He had done.

She, too, was betrayed and crucified; "dying
daily," like her great Lord; denied, mocked, and
despised; a child of sorrows and acquainted with
grief; misrepresented, misconstrued, agonizing;
stripped of her garments, yet, like the King's daugh
ter that she is, "all glorious within"; dead even, it
seemed at times, yet, like her natural Prototype,
still united to the Godhead; laid in the sepulchre,
fenced in by secular powers, yet ever rising again
on Easter Days, spiritual and transcendent; passing
through doors that men thought closed for ever,
spreading her mystical banquets in upper rooms and
by sea shores; and, above all, ascending for ever
beyond the skies and dwelling in heavenly places
with Him who is her Bridegroom and her God.

Difficulty after difficulty melted as I looked on
her face. I saw now how it must be that outward
aspects should change, and that the swathed child
in the Catacombs should seem very different from
the reigning mother and mistress of churches, the
queen of the world. I saw, too, how even her con
stitution must appear to change: how the limbs,
that at first move spasmodically and clumsily, should,

no CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

as she increased in strength, become more and more
controlled by the visible Head; how the great child
ish gestures of the early Councils should pass little
by little into the serene voice issuing from the
lips; how the unordered implicit knowledge of the
first centuries should express itself more and more
precisely as she learned how to speak to men that
which she knew from the beginning; how gradually
she would announce even in our own days that
principle on which she had acted from the begin
ning — namely, that in matters that concerned the
vital contents of her message, she was protected,
in the utterances of her Head, by the Spirit of Truth
that had first formed her body in the womb of
the human race. For this is, in the long run, the
inevitable claim that a Church must make which
professes to stand for Revelation.

I do not say that all difficulties went at once.
They did not. In fact, I do not suppose that there
is any Catholic alive who would dare to say that he
has no difficulties even now; but "ten thousand
difficulties do not make one doubt." There remain
always the old eternal problems of sin and free will;
but to one who has once looked full into the eyes of
this great Mother, these problems are as nothing.
She knows, if we do not; she knows, even if she does

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT in

not say that she knows; for within her somewhere,
far down in her great heart, there lies hid the very
wisdom of God Himself.

And all this great vision I saw now for the first
time fulfilled in what I had been accustomed to
call the Church of Rome. I turned and looked
again at the Church of England and there was an
extraordinary change. It was not that she had
become unlovable. I love her even now as one
may love an unsatisfactory human friend. She
had a hundred virtues, a delicate speech, a romantic
mind; a pleasant aroma hung about her; she was
infinitely pathetic and appealing; she had the ad
vantage of dwelling in the shadowed twilight of her
own vagueness, in glorious houses, even though not
of her building; she had certain gracious ways,
pretty modes of expression; her music and her
language still seem to me extraordinarily beautiful;
and above all, she is the nursing mother of many of
my best friends, and for over thirty years educated
and nursed me, too, with indulgent kindness. In
deed, I was not ungrateful for all this, but it had
become entirely impossible for me ever to reverence
her again as the divine mistress of my soul.

It is true that she had fed me with the best food
she had, and that Our Lord had accompanied those

ii2 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

gifts with better gifts of His own; she had, indeed,
pointed me to Him rather than to herself. But all
this did not make her my queen or even my mother;
and, hi fact, even in other matters she had failed me,
through no fault of her own, but rather because of
the misfortune of her own birth and nature. When
I had asked her questions that really concerned the
very life I was leading under her protection, she had
given me no answer. She had told me only to lie
still and love her, and that was not enough. A
soul cannot be eternally satisfied with kindness and
a soothing murmur and the singing of hymns, and
there is a liberty which is a more intolerable slavery
than the heaviest of chains. I did not want to go
this way and that at my own will: I wanted to know
the way hi which God wished me to walk. I did
not want to be free to change my grasp on truth:
I needed rather a truth that itself should make me
free. I did not want broad ways of pleasantness,
but the narrow Way that is Truth and Life. And
for all these things she was helpless.

There, then, she stood, my old mistress, pathetic
and loving, claiming me as her servant by every
human tie; and there, on the other side, in a blaze
of fierce light, stood the Bride of Christ, dominant
and imperious, but with a look in her eyes and a

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 113

smile on her lips that could rise only from a heavenly
vision, claiming me, not because she had as yet done
anything for me, not because I was an Englishman
who loved English ways — or even Italian, for the
matter of that — but simply and solely because I
was a child of God and because to her He had said,
"Take this child away and nurse it for Me and I
will give thee thy wages"; because, first and last,
she was His Bride and I was His son.

If at that choice I had hesitated and turned back
to her whom I knew and loved, in preference to her
whom as yet I saw and feared only at a distance, I
know that I should have fallen, without even the
shadow of a doubt, under that condemnation uttered
by my Lord: "Unless a man leave his father and
mother and all that he hath, he cannot be My
disciple." I went to my Superior, therefore, in
the early summer, told him once more of my
state of mind, and obtained leave from him to
go home to my mother's house for a few months'
rest and reflection.

VI

§ i. I was in a very curious and unsatisfactory
state when I came home. I do not propose to dis
cuss these symptoms in public, but, to sum it up in
a word, I was entirely exhausted on the spiritual
side. Yet it was now absolutely clear to me,
so far as I could see intellectually, that my
submission was a duty. I made this clear also
to my mother, from whom I had had no secrets
from the beginning; and I settled down, as she
desired me, towards, I think, the end of May, to
allow myself time and energy for a reaction, if such
should come. Occasionally I celebrated the Com
munion still in the little chapel of the house, for the
reasons that I have already explained; but, with
the consent of my Superior, I refused all invitations
to preach, saying that my plans were at present
undecided. This, of course, was absolutely true,
as I sufficiently trusted my Superior's and my
mother's judgment to allow of the possibility of a
change of mind. I was still technically a member
of the Community of the Resurrection, said my

n6 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

Office regularly, and observed the other details of
the rule that were binding upon me. I had told,
however, a few intimate friends of what I thought
would happen.

§ 2. I have mentioned before a certain MS. book
upon the Elizabethan days of the Church of Eng
land. This had aroused my interest, and I began
to consider whether, as a kind of safety-valve, I
could not make some sort of historical novel upon
the subject. The result was that I was soon hard at
work upon a book, afterwards published under the
title, "By What Authority?" It was extraordinary
how excited I became. I worked for about eight
or ten hours every day, either writing, or reading
and annotating every historical book and pamphlet
I could lay my hands upon. I found paragraphs in
magazines, single sentences in certain essays, and
all of these I somehow worked into the material
from which my book grew. By the beginning of
September the novel was three-quarters finished.
I have formed a great many criticisms upon that
book now. It is far too long; it is rather sentimen
tal; it is too full of historical detail; above all, the
mental atmosphere there depicted is at least a cen
tury before its time; men did not, until almost
Caroline days, think and feel as I have represented

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 117

them thinking and feeling in Elizabeth's reign.
In two points only am I satisfied with it: there is,
I think, a certain pleasant freshness about it, and I
have not as yet detected in it any historical errors.
I was absurdly careful in details that were wholly
negligible with regard to general historical truth.
This work, I think, was an exceptionally good safety-
valve, for my spirits, and if I had not found it I do
not quite know what would have happened.

Now, more than ever, my resolution began to
run clear. In book after book that I read I found
the old lines of the Church of England burning
themselves upwards, like the lines of buried founda
tions showing through the grass in a hot summer.
I began to marvel more than ever how in the world
I could have even imagined that the Anglican
Communion possessed an identity of life with the
ancient Church in England. For years past I had
claimed to be saying Mass, and that the Sacrifice
of the Mass was held as a doctrine by the Church
of England; and here in Elizabethan days were
priests hunted to death for the crime of doing that
which I had claimed to do. I had supposed that our
wooden Communion tables were altars, and here
in Tudor times were the old stones of the altars
defiled and insulted deliberately by the officials of

n8 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

the Church to which I still nominally belonged,
and wooden tables substituted instead. Things
which were dear to me at Mirfield — vestments,
crucifixes, rosaries — in Elizabethan days were de
nounced as " trinkets" and "muniments of super
stition." I began to wonder at myself, and a little
while later gave up celebrating the Communion
service.

§ 3. Sometime in the course of the summer, at
my mother's wish, I went to consult three eminent
members of the Church of England — a well-
known parish clergyman, an eminent dignitary,
and a no less eminent layman. They were all three
as kind as possible. Above all, not one of them
reproached me with disloyalty to my father's mem
ory. They understood, as all with chivalrous
instincts must have understood, that such an argu
ment as that was wholly unworthy.

The parish clergyman did not affect me at all.
He hardly argued, and he said very little that I
can remember, except to call attention to the revival
of spiritual life in the Church of England during the
last century. I did not see that this proved any
thing except that God rewarded an increase of zeal
by an increase of blessing. He himself was an ex
cellent example of both. Neither could I see the

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 119

force of his further argument that, since this spir
itual revival showed itself along sacramental lines,
therefore here was an evidence for the validity of
Anglican Sacraments. For, first, precisely the same
revival has been at work with regard to sacramental
views among the Presbyterians, and high-church
Anglicans do not for that reason accept the validity
of Presbyterian Orders; and, second, it is natural
that among Anglicans the revival should have taken
that form, since the Prayer Book itself affords scope
in this direction.

The dignitary with whom I stayed a day or two,
and who was also extremely forbearing, did not, I
think, understand my position. He asked me
whether there were not devotions in the Roman
Church to which I felt a repugnance. I told him
that there were — notably the popular devotions
to Our Blessed Lady. He then expressed great
surprise that I could seriously contemplate submit
ting to a communion in which I should have to use
methods of worship of which I disapproved. I tried
in vain to make it clear that I proposed becoming
a Roman Catholic not because I was necessarily
attracted by her customs, but because I believed
that Church to be the Church of God, and that
therefore if my opinions on minor details differed

120 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

from hers, it was all the worse for me; that I had
better, in fact, correct my notions as soon as pos
sible, for I should go to Rome not as a critic or a
teacher, but as a child and a learner. I think he
thought this an immoral point of view. Religion
seemed to him to be a matter more or less of indi
vidual choice and tastes.

This interview afforded me one more illustration
of the conviction which I had formed to the effect
that as a Teaching Body — as fulfilling, that is, the
principal function for which Christ instituted a
Church — the Church of England was hopeless.
Here was one of her chief rulers assuming, almost
as an axiom, that I must accept only those dogmas
that individually happened to recommend themselves
to my reason or my temperament. Tacitly, then,
he allowed no authoritative power on the part of
the Church to demand an intellectual submission;
tacitly, again, then, he made no real distinction
between Natural and Revealed Religion: Christ
had not revealed positive truths to which, so soon
as we accepted Christ as a Divine Teacher, we
instantly submitted without hesitation. Or, if this
seem too strong, it may be said that the prelate in
question at any rate denied the existence anywhere
on earth of an authority capable of proposing the

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 121

truths of Revelation in an authoritative manner,
and hence, indirectly evacuated Revelation of any
claim to demand man's submission.

The layman, with whom also I stayed, had showed
me many kindnesses before, and now crowned them
all by his charity and sympathy. He emphasized
the issues with extreme clearness, telling me that
if I believed the Pope to be the necessary centre of
Christian unity, of course I must submit to him at
once; but he asked me to be quite certain that this
was so, and not to submit merely because I thought
the Pope an extremely useful aid to unity. The
layman further told me that he himself believed
that the Pope was the natural outcome of ecclesi
astical development; that he was Vicar of Christ
jure ecclesiastico, but not jure divino; and he pointed
out to me that, unless I was absolutely certain of
the latter point, I should be far happier in the
Church of England and far more useful in the work
of promoting Christian unity. With all this I
heartily agreed. A further curious circumstance
was that, at this time, a prelate was staying in the
house with me who had had a great influence upon
my previous life. He knew why I was there, but
I do not think we spoke of it at all. After my
return home again, my late host sent me a quantity of

122 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

extraordinarily interesting private documents, which
I read and returned. But they did not affect me.
They are documents that have since been published.

Towards the end of July I was once more tired
out in mind and soul, and was in further misery
because an ultimatum had come from Mirfield,
perfectly kind and perfectly firm, telling me that I
must now either return to the annual assembling
of the community or consider myself no longer a
member. The Brother who was commissioned to
write this had been a fellow-probationer of mine,
with whom I had been on terms of great intimacy.
He wrote in obvious distress, and after my answer,
written in equal distress, telling him that I could
not come back, I never since received any communi
cation from him until one day when I met him by
chance in the train. We took up then, I hoped
at the time, our old friendship; but even more re
cently he has again refused my acquaintance, on
the ground that I showed too much "bitterness"
in public controversy.

Further, about this time I was engaged in an
other rather painful correspondence. A dignitary
of the Church of England, the occupant of an his
toric see and an old friend of my family, hearing
somehow that I was in distress of mind as to my

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 123

spiritual allegiance, wrote to me an extremely kind
letter, asking me to come and stay with him. I
answered that I was indeed in trouble, but had
already looked into the matter so far as I was ca
pable. But I suppose that I must have seemed to
hint that I was still open to conviction, for he wrote
again, still more affectionately, and then somehow
the correspondence became the retraversing of the
old ground I had passed months before. Finally
I told him plainly that I was already intellectually
decided, and received in answer a very sharp letter
or two, telling me that if I would only go and work
hard in some slum parish all my difficulties would
disappear. He might equally well have told me to go
and teach Buddhism. In his last letter he prophe
sied that one of three things would happen to me:
either (which he hoped) I should return quickly to
the Church of England with my sanity regained,
or (which he feared) I should lose my Chris
tian belief altogether, or (which he seemed to fear
still more, and in which he was perfectly right) I
should become an obstinate, hardened Romanist.
It appeared to him impossible that faith and open-
mindedness should survive conversion. I hope I
have not wronged him in this representation of
his views. I destroyed his letter immediately.

124 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

§ 4. In order to distract myself from all this, I
then went for a few days' bicycling tour alone in the
south of England, dressed as a layman, calling first
at the Carthusian Monastery of St. Hugh, Park-
minster, with an introduction to one of the Fathers,
himself a convert clergyman. He received me very
courteously, but the visit depressed me even fur
ther, if that were possible. He seemed to me not
to understand that I really asked nothing but to
be taught; that I was not coming as a critic, but as
a child. I do not think that I resented this, because
my whole soul told me it was not quite just; if it
had been just, I think I should have assumed a
kind of internal indignation as a salve to wounded
vanity. I went on in despair and stayed a Sunday
in lodgings at Chichester, where for the last time,
in a little church opposite the Cathedral, I made my
Anglican Confession, telling the clergyman plainly
that I was practically certain I should become a
Roman Catholic. He very kindly gave me his
absolution and told me to cheer up.

Then for the last time I attended, as an Anglican,
cathedral services and received Communion; for
I still thought it my duty to use every conceivable
means of grace within my reach. On the Monday
I rode on to Lewes, thence to Rye, where, at sup-

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 125

per in the "George Inn," I had a long conversation
with a man whom I took to be a certain distinguished
actor, talking to him for the most part about the
Catholic Church, which he also loved from a dis
tance, but not saying anything about my intentions.
As a matter of fact, he did nearly all the talking. On
the following day I rode home by Mayfield, all
through a blazing summer's day, looking with a
kind of gnawing envy at the convent walls as I
passed them, and staying for a few minutes in a
beautiful little dark Catholic Church that I ran
across unexpectedly in a valley.

§ 5. Now it seems very difficult to say why I
had not submitted before this. The reasons, I
think, were as follows. First, there was the wish
of my mother and family that I should allow myself
every possible opportunity for a change of mind
under new surroundings, and this, even, by itself,
would have been sufficient to hold me back for a
while. I was trying to be docile, it must be remem
bered, and to take every hint that could possibly
come from God. Secondly, there was my own state
of mind, which, though intellectually convinced,
was still in an extraordinary condition. I entirely
refuse to describe it elaborately — it would not be
decent; but the sum of it was a sense of a huge,

126 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

soulless, spiritual wilderness, in which, as clear as
a view before rain, towered up the City of God.
It was there before me, as vivid and overwhelming
as a revelation, and I stood there and eyed it, watch
ing for the least wavering if it were a mirage, or
the least hint of evil if it were of the devil's building.
Cardinal Newman's phrase describes best, I think,
my mental condition. I knew that the Catholic
Church was the true Church, but I did not absolutely
know that I knew it.

I had no kind of emotional attraction towards it,
no illusions of any kind about it. I knew perfectly
well that it was human as well as divine, that crimes
had been committed within its walls; that the ways
and customs and language of its citizens would be
other than those of the dear homely town which I had
left; that I should find hardness there, unfamiliar
manners, even suspicion and blame. But for all that
it was divine; it was built upon the Rock of rocks;
its foundations were jewelled even if its streets were
as hard as gold; and the Lamb was the light of it.

But the setting out towards its gates was a hard
task. I had no energy, no sense of welcome or ex
ultation; I knew hardly more than three or four of
its inmates. I was deadly sick and tired of the
whole thing.

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 127

But God was merciful very soon. Even now I
do not exactly know what precipitated the final
step; the whole world seemed to me poised in a kind
of paralysis. ... I could not move; there was no
other to suggest it to me. . . . But at the begin
ning of September, with my mother's knowledge, I
wrote a letter to a priest I knew personally, putting
myself in his hands. This friend of mine, also a
convert, was now contemplating entering the Do
minican Order, and recommended me, therefore,
to Father Reginald Buckler, O.P., then living at
Woodchester. Two or three days later I received
notice that I was expected at the Priory, and on
Monday, September 7, in lay clothes, I set out on
my journey. My mother said good-bye to me at
the station.

VII

§ i. I do not suppose that anyone ever entered
the City of God with less emotion than mine. It
seemed to me that I was utterly without feeling;
I had neither joy nor sorrow, nor dread nor excite
ment. There was the Truth, as aloof as an ice-
peak, and I had to embrace it. Never for one single
instant did I doubt that, nor, perhaps it is unneces
sary to say, have I ever doubted it since. I tried to
reproach myself with my coldness, but all fell quite
flat. I was as one coming out of the glare of arti
ficial light, out of warmth and brightness and
friendliness, into a pale daylight of cold and dreary
certainty. I was uninterested and quite positive.

§ 2. I arrived at Stroud towards evening, saying
my Anglican Office for the last time on the way,
and, after waiting about for a while, entered the
omnibus for Woodchester, which is a few miles
distant. The drive was as dreary as everything
else, though it should not have been, for the country
is really beautiful and romantic. There is a long
twisting valley between hills that rise on either side

130 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

in a manner not unlike some parts of Italy. We
drove on and on; I listened unintelligently to the
conversation of an old man with a rosy face, and
noticed one or two children who were troublesope.
But nothing seemed to me to matter at all or to be
of the slightest significance.

A lay-brother was waiting for me at the foot of
the little steep stony path that leads from the road
to the Priory, and together we climbed it. Near
the gate of the church, in the darkening evening light,
there was standing a figure in white, who, when he
saw us, came down the hill and took my hands in
his; and, almost in silence, we went on and into
the house. But even then I was utterly dull and
stupid.

I do not propose to describe in detail the three
days that followed. After all, I do not know why
anyone should be interested in them. Nor do I
propose to describe the endless kindness, courtesy,
and patience that I found in Father Reginald and
the Prior, and, in fact, in everyone with whom I
had to do. My instructor and I walked together on
the three afternoons and talked of this and that,
and in my spare time I studied the Penny Catechism.
One detail, however, I must mention, at the risk even
of annoying that dear Dominican Father. He asked

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 131

me on the Thursday whether I had any difficulties.
I told him "No." "But, surely, indulgences!" he
said. Again I told him that these were not the
slightest difficulty. I was not sure that I perfectly
understood them, but I was quite sure that I per
fectly believed them, as indeed everything else
which the Church proposed to my faith. But he
was not quite satisfied, and gave me a full and
detailed instruction on the point.

On these evenings, too, he always came in for
an hour or two in my room, on the first floor. Each
morning I heard Mass and attempted a sort of med
itation. I attended other Offices now and then and
was always at Compline and the exquisite Domin
ican ceremony of the Sake Regina afterwards. I
noticed also with mild interest the resemblance of
the Dominican to the Sarum rite in various points.

On the Friday, the day fixed for my reception, I
took a long, lonely walk, still entirely uninterested,
and visited the church of Minchinhampton, on the
opposite side of the valley. I was caught in the
rain, I remember, and had tea in a small public-house
parlour, where there was a rather witty list of in
structions to visitors as to the personal prowess
of the landlord and his intentions of enforcing order.
Then I came back to the Priory about six o'clock.

132 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

I cannot imagine why I am writing down all
this, except that it seems impossible to think of the
events of those days under any other images than
those of the small external details which happened.
Even if I had glowing spiritual experiences to re-
ord, I should not do so; but the truth is that I had
none. There seemed nothing within me at all
except an absolute certainty that I was doing God's
will and was entering the doors of His Church.
I had no elevations of spirit and no temptations
against faith or anything else; and this, I must con
fess, lasted not only through my reception and
First Communion, but for some months afterwards.
Even Rome itself, though I learned strange and
astounding lessons there, sent very few emotions
through me.

In fact, I was experiencing at this time the nat
ural reaction of the very real and appalling struggle
that I had been engaged in previously for nearly a
year. During that time, in various forms, I had
gone through the whole gamut of such spiritual
life as I possessed, and the result was that my fac
ulties had sunk into a kind of lethargy. Even this
I only mention now, as I have known more than
one convert utterly dismayed and astonished at
similar experiences. The soul had expected the

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 133

visible opening of heaven, the pouring out of floods of
sensible grace, torrents of pleasure, dazzling glory
and super-terrestrial sounds, and instead there had
descended a pall of heaviness with but one light to
pierce it, and that the Star of Divine Faith, as steady
and certain as God upon His throne.

Of course those souls are very happy who find it
otherwise. One such friend of mine, now a priest
also, told me that his supreme difficulty in mak
ing his submission was the thought that he must
repudiate his own Orders. Up to that time he
had been a Ritualistic clergyman, doing a devoted
work among the poor in one of the great Eng
lish towns and celebrating every day for years what
he believed to be the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
He told me that he almost dreaded his First Com
munion, because he was afraid that, since it was
inconceivable that Our Lord could be more gracious
to him than He had been at Anglican altars, he him
self might be tempted to doubt the reality of the
change. But the moment that the Sacred Host
touched his tongue he knew the difference. He told
me that never again after that moment did he
doubt for a single second that hitherto he had
received nothing but bread and wine, accompanied
by unsacramental grace, and that this new gift

»

i34 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

was indeed nothing else than the Immaculate
Body of Christ. He is, moreover, a middle-aged,
unemotional man.

§ 3. At about half -past six Father Reginald took
me into the Chapter House, and there, kneeling down
by the Prior's seat, I made my confession, together
with acts of faith, hope, charity, and contrition,
and received absolution. I did not receive condi
tional baptism — although of course I was perfectly
willing to do so — since two witnesses at my previous
baptism had given independent testimony that the
ceremony had been undoubtedly performed accord
ing to Catholic requirements. Then, like a father
with his son, he kissed me, and I went through
into church to make my thanksgiving.

On the following morning I received Holy Com
munion in the beautiful little church, from the
hands of the Prior. I stayed over the Sunday,
with a curious, passionless kind of contentment
growing in my heart almost every moment, and on
the Monday journeyed up to the north to stay with
my priest-friend, who was then acting as chaplain
to a Catholic household.

Rather a strange surprise awaited me here. A
few weeks previously I had had one of those vivid
dreams that leave, during all the day that follows

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 135

them, an inexplicable, incommunicable joy. I had
dreamed that I was walking alone over high hills
towards the sea, feeling rather lonely and desolate.
The ground was bare all about me, but as I went
on I began to see woods in front, and then suddenly
I came out on a hilltop and saw below me a great
sweep of woods and beyond them the sea. But
set right in the middle of the woods was the roof of
a large house, and the moment I saw this I was
conscious of a sudden overwhelming joy, as of a
child coming home. Then I awoke, still extraor
dinarily happy.

Now I had never before been to see my friend, nor
had he ever given me the least outline of a descrip
tion of the place in which he lived. I did not even
know that it was near the sea. When, therefore,
I arrived and saw that the sea was not far off, I
was interested, and told my friend the dream, re
marking that in other points there was no resem
blance between the dream and this place. But on
the next morning he took me up a hill behind the
house, and there, strangely enough, in all their
main features the two things corresponded. There
were the roofs and chimneys of the Catholic house,
the sweep of the woods, and the long horizon of the
sea beyond. Yet there were one or two small

136 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

details, which I now forget, which appeared to me
different; neither was there any emotional sense of
joy.

§ 4. And now began the inevitable consequences
of what I had done. I do not know how many letters
I received in the few days following the announce
ment in the papers of my conversion; but I had at
least two heavy posts every day. These had to be
answered, and what made it harder was that among
them all there were not more than two or three
from Catholics. This was perfectly natural, as I
hardly knew more than that number of Catholics.
One telegram indeed warmed my heart; for it was
from that priest to whom I owed so much and of
whose conversion I had heard with such sorrow in
Damascus six years before. The rest were from
Anglicans — clergy, men, women, and even chil
dren — most of whom regarded me either as a delib
erate traitor (but of these there were very few) or
as an infatuated fool, or as an impatient, headstrong,
ungrateful bigot. Many of these kindly concealed
their sentiments as well as they could, but it was
for the most part plain enough what they thought.
From one clergyman, still an Anglican, I received
an enthusiastic letter of congratulation on having
been happy enough to have found my way into the

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 137

City of Peace. Eight years later he also entered
that city.

I think that I answered them all, even down to
one from a sincere woman who besought me to
remember a sermon I had once preached upon the
Prodigal Son, and to make haste to come back to
the Father's house. I answered this, very naturally,
by observing that, on the contrary, I had just done
so, pointing out to her that no conceivable motive
except the conviction to that effect would have
brought me out of the Church of England. I also
expressed a hope that one day she would come too.
She handed my letter to her clergyman, who replied
to me instantly with a violent accusation of treach
ery, telling me that when he had asked me to preach
a mission in his parish he had thought me to be
trustworthy; he was sorry now that my "per
version" had so quickly degraded my character.
Again I answered by quoting his parishioner's
remarks to me and observing that I could scarcely
answer her otherwise than the way in which I had
done. He replied once more with a half -apology,
saying that the woman had given him to under
stand that I had written to her first, and that he
regretted having used such strong expressions.

Another letter which I received caused me con-

i38 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

siderable pain as well as astonishment. It was
from a middle-aged woman whom I had thought
sincerely my friend — the wife of an eminent digni
tary in the Church of England. The letter was
short, bitter, and fierce, reproaching me for the
dishonour I had done to my father's name and
memory. It seemed to me then — and it seems to
me still — incomprehensible that a person of true
and deep religion, such as she undoubtedly was,
should utter this particular reproach; just as if the
thought of this dishonour to my father had not been
so evidently a Satanic temptation that I had not
dared even to hesitate over its rejection. Very
different from this was the deep and generous
phrase of a certain Anglican Bishop, who, in speak
ing to my mother after my departure for Rome,
said to her, "Remember that he has followed his
conscience after all, and what else could his father
wish for him than that?" I can only conclude that
the letter was written in a mood of blind anger.

But such controversies were very rare. Once
again, later, I was informed by a clergyman that
such an act of schism as I had committed always
bore "bitter fruit," and that apparently in my case,
as in so many others, "honour had taken to itself
wings." All this was apropos of the fact that after

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 139

my ordination in Rome I had come harmlessly to
live in the same town as himself, though not engaged
at that time in any evangelistic works, and that
nearly two years previously, against my own will,
I had been sent to preach an Anglican mission in
his parish. I answered by hinting that unless he
withdrew those expressions, which I knew very well
he would repeat in private conversations, I should
consider myself at liberty to send his letter to the
newspapers. He withdrew them.

Yet, with a very few exceptions of this kind, I
must acknowledge with the greatest gratitude that
the charity with which I was treated by members
of the Anglican communion in general simply as
tonished me. I did not know that there was so
much generosity in the world.

A few days later I went to stay at Erdington
Abbey, with the Benedictines, and here again I
began to find more and more evidences of the wel
come that was waiting for me in my true home.
Two of the Fathers, themselves convert-clergymen,
took all pains to set me at my ease and to show me
kindness and sympathy in every conceivable way.
It was reassuring to me also at this time to meet
here another well-known clergyman, of whom
previously I had known nothing except by reputa-

i4o CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

tion, and who had preceded me by a few months
into the Catholic Church. I need not say that we
talked a great deal.

A day or two later, once more I went back to
my mother's house, where I had the satisfaction
of finishing the last pages of "By What Authority?"
before leaving England, on All Souls' Day, to take
up my residence in Rome with a view to studying for
the priesthood.

One more instance of Anglican charity occurred
two minutes after my train had left Victoria station.
As my mother was turning away, she saw coming
towards her a prelate of the Episcopalian Scottish
Church, a High Churchman and an old friend of
her own. He had come to say good-bye to me and
to wish me God-speed. I have not forgotten that
and, please God, I never shall.

VIII

And now I do not know whether it is respectful
to my holy mother the Church to attempt to say
what she has been to me ever since the day that I
walked blind and dumb and miserable into her
arms. But I have said so much of others that I
will venture even this. She, too, needs no charity
of mine, for she is the fount and river of it.

§ i. It seems very remarkable to be obliged
to say that the idea of returning to the Church of
England is as inconceivable as the idea of seeking
to enter the Choctaw fold. Yet, humanly speaking,
and looking at it from the Anglican side, so far as
that is possible, I quite understand why it is that
Anglicans are always accustomed to say of every
convert that "he is certain to come back." First
of all, they naturally desire that all persons, however
obscure, who are not likely to disgrace themselves,
should be under the same allegiance as that to
which they pay their own homage. Why, Cath
olics have a similar wish on their side! Secondly,
in a word, they do not understand the situation.
They are so accustomed to division and disunion

142 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

on the deepest matters of faith in their own body,
that they can scarcely conceive its being otherwise
elsewhere. Either, they say, these divisions must
be in Catholicism too, though beneath the surface,
or, if they are not, it must mean that intellectual
activity is suppressed by the "iron uniformity" of
the system. They do not at all understand how
"the truth can make (us) free." It is a complete
begging of the question, I allow, but it appears to
me more true every day that I live, that those few
persons who do return do so either by the road of
complete unbelief, or through some grave sin in
their lives, or through a species of insanity, or
through the fact that they never really grasped the
Catholic position at all.

It is of no use to pile up asseverations, but, in
a word, it may be said that to return from the
Catholic Church to the Anglican would be the
exchange of certitude for doubt, of faith for agnos
ticism, of substance for shadow, of brilliant light
for sombre gloom, of historical, world-wide fact for
unhistorical, provincial theory. I do not know
how to express myself more mildly than that;
though even this, no doubt, will appear a mon
strous extravagance, at the least, to the sincere and
whole-hearted members of the Anglican communion.

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 143

Only yesterday, in fact, an educated young High
Churchman looked me unblenchingly in the face
and said that the " Roman idea is all very well in
theory; but as a practical system it does not work
— it does not square with history; whereas the
Anglican communion — !" Well, well!

§ 2. Are there, then, no defects or disappoint
ments that await the convert to Catholicism?
There are as many defects awaiting his discovery
as reside in human nature; the number of his dis
appointments will vary according to the number
of his expectations.

First, then, there is a very singular attitude
assumed by many Catholics, whose own faith is
beyond doubt, with regard to the conversion of
non-Catholics, and of the English in particular.
I omit as irrelevant, of course, the lukewarmness
of the lukewarm, or the actual religious spite of the
very few persons who are actually jealous of others
possessing what they themselves find so precious.
It is rather of the strange mentality of persons who,
themselves practising their faith fervently, seem
entirely indifferent to the missionary duties of the
Church. "I hear that A. B. has become a Cath-
olic," said a good Catholic woman once. "What in
the world has she done that for?"

144 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

5 f

Now such an attitude of mind as this is not only
a defect — to use a very mild word — but it was,
for me at any rate, a very real disappointment. It
had never even entered my head to expect that such
a position could be conceivable in one who valued
his faith. And, to tell the truth, it is not so un
common as one might think. Now this is nothing
else than sheer Sectarianism; for unless the Catholic
Religion is intended for the whole world, it is false.
It is literally Catholic, or nothing. Well, this was
completely bewildering to me. I had been taught
to believe that Catholics had at least the grace of
Proselytism; that they possessed, at any rate, that
passion for converting others which is usually one
of the signs of strong conviction. And here I
found, not only indifference in many cases, but even
a kind of veiled opposition towards every form of
activity in this direction. "Converts have so much
zeal," it is said; "they are indiscreet and impetu
ous. The steady old ways are preferable; let us
keep our faith to ourselves, and let others keep
theirs."

I have come lately to understand that this Sec
tarianism is perhaps in some cases the result of the
centuries of penal law under which Catholics in
England have lived. They have been for so long

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 145

accustomed to shroud their sacred mysteries, in
order to protect both the mysteries and themselves,
that a kind of formless tradition has grown up to
the effect that it is best to leave well alone and
to risk as little as possible. If that is so, Sectari
anism is at least an honourable scar; yet it is
none the less a defect. Curiously enough, however,
it is not usually among the really old Catholic
families that it makes its appearance; these are,
generally, as ardent missionaries as the convert
himself: it is rather among the spiritually nouveaux
riches — among the Catholics of one or two genera
tions only — that this spiritual snobbishness is the
more frequent.

A second defect, akin to the first, is that of jeal
ousy against converts. Now I should not have
ventured to draw particular attention to this if I
myself had suffered from it to any marked degree,
since in that case I should distrust my own judg
ment in dealing with it. The fact is that I have
not. I have received extraordinary generosity on
all sides, even in such matters as my very early
ordination in Rome after only nine months of
Catholic life. Of course there were many who
disapproved of the rapidity with which I was pro
moted to the priesthood, but in practically all these

i46 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

cases it would be ludicrously impossible to suspect
in them the presence of jealousy or of that subtle
form of it which manifests itself in a desire to snub
the neophyte. On the whole I am astonished at
the kindness which Catholics have always shown
to me.

But I have come across case after case, have heard
sentences and fragments of conversation which leave
no possibility for doubting but that many converts
do find jealousy and suspicion on the part of second-
rate Catholics as among the greatest trials of their
life. ~ SflcrT^an attitude is, indeed, exceedingly
human and natural. "Thou hast made them equal
unto us," cries the man in the parable, "who have
borne the burden and heat of the day!" And this
attitude is, of course, often apparently justified by
the ill-behaviour and the arrogance of a convert
or two now and then — of persons who march into
the Church, so to speak, with banners flying and
drums playing, as if they themselves were the con-
^querors instead of the conquered. But, honestly,
I think that arrogance amongst converts is extremely
rare. The course of instruction through which
they have to pass, the vast sacrifices which many
of them have had to make — these things, to say
nothing of the amazing Grace of God that has

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 147

brought them into the Church at all, usually purge
and chasten the soul in an extraordinary degree.
After all, ceteris paribus, the convert has been called
upon by God to give a greater witness of sincerity
than can any man, who, as a Catholic from the
cradle, has found his main duty merely in the
keeping of the Faith. Ceteris paribus, it is a more
heroic act to break with the past than to be loyal
to it.

Here, again, however, it is not amongst the
genuine "old Catholics " — the aristocrats of the
Faith, so to speak — that jealousy or suspicion
towards converts usually manifest themselves, but,
once more, amongst those who desire to be thought
so — amongst those who, in a determination to mark
their aloofness from the "convert-spirit," think to
advertise the fact by fault-finding and ill-mannered
contempt. They have come into their fortune
comparatively recently, and they think to hide their
spiritual origins by snubbing those who make no
claim to such spiritual aristocracy. It is among
this class, too, that that other kind of jealousy on
behalf of favourite churches or priests usually
manifests itself — a jealousy that is not content
with plaguing the life out of the unhappy clergy,
who, they think, alone can understand them, but

148 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

proceeds further by slander and spite and gossip
to attack the good name of everyone else.

There are, then, defects amongst Catholics — I
have named two — and it is entirely useless to deny
them. Only they are not, in the very least, of the
kind which non- Catholics suspect or pretend. These
defects are such as are common to human nature
everywhere — to individuals, that is, who fail to
live up to the standards of their religion. But the
faults supposed by Anglicans to be most charac
teristic of those who pay their allegiance to Rome
are simply not characteristic at all. First, there
is absolutely none of that diversity on matters of
faith which the Anglican, in his own case, appar
ently accepts as his " cross "; there are no "schools
of thought" in this sense, at all; there is not the
faintest dogmatic difference between these two
groups of temperaments into which the whole
human race may more or less be divided — the
maximizers and the minimizers — or, as they are
labelled by Anglicans in the case of the Catholic
Church — the Ultramontanes and the Gallicans.
So far as these camps exist at all, though, frankly,
I must confess my entire inability so to classify
Catholics, they are concerned, I imagine, merely
with the prudence or imprudence of a proposed

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 149

action, with a like or dislike of "Roman" methods
and such like secondary affairs. Again, there is no
"seething discontent," so far as I am aware, within
the walls of the Church. Certainly I continually
am hearing of it, but always from non- Catholics.
There is no intellectual revolt on the part of the
stronger minds of the Roman communion that I
have ever heard of — except from non-Catholics.
There is no "alienation of the men"; on the con
trary, in this country, as also in Italy and France,
I am continually astonished by the extraordinary
predominance of the male sex over the female in
attendance at Mass and in the practice of private
prayer in our churches. At a recent casual occa
sion, upon my remarking to the parish-priest of a
suburban church that I have always been struck
by this phenomenon, he told me that on the previous
evening he had happened to count the congrega
tion from the west gallery and that the proportion
of men to women had been about as two to one.
This, of course, was something of an exceptional
illustration of my point. All these charges, there
fore, so freely levelled against us, are, it appears to
me, entirely void of substance. Of course there
are hot temperaments and cold, apostolic and
diplomatic natures, among Catholics, as elsewhere.

ISO CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

Of course occasionally a little revolt breaks out,
as it will break out in every human society; of
course self-willed persons — women as well as men
-will occasionally dissociate themselves from
Catholic life, or, worse still, attempt to remain
Catholic in name while wholly un-Catholic in
spirit. But what I mean to deny is that these
incidents even approximate to tendencies — still
less that, as tendencies, they are in the faintest
degree characteristic of Catholicism — or that the
astonishing calm on the surface of the Church is,
as a matter of fact, undermined by fierce internal
struggles. It is simply not true.

Again, I must emphatically deny that formalism
is characteristic of Catholicism in a way that it is
not characteristic of Protestantism. There is, how
ever, just this shadow of truth in the charge; viz.,
that amongst Catholics emotionalism and even
strong sentiment is considerably discouraged, and
that the heart of religion is thought rather to reside
in the adherence and obedience of the will. The
result is, of course, that persons of a comparatively
undevout nature will, as Catholics, continue to
practise their religion, and sometimes, in ungenerous
characters, only the barest minimum of their obli
gations; whereas as Anglicans they would give it

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 151

up altogether. It follows that perhaps it may be
true to say that the average emotional level of a
Catholic congregation is lower than the correspond
ing level of a Protestant congregation, but it is
not at all a consequence that therefore Catholics
are more formalistic than Protestants. These cold,
undevout souls — or rather these souls of a natu
rally undevout temperament — adhere to their re
ligion through the sheer motive of obedience, and
it is surely remarkable to condemn them on that
account! Obedience to the will of God — or even
what is merely believed to be the will of God — is
actually more meritorious, not less, when it is un
accompanied by emotional consolations and sensible
fervour.

In a word, then, I would say this: that, judging
from an experience of nine years as an Anglican
clergyman and eight years as a Catholic priest, there
are defects in both the Catholic and the Anglican
communions; that in the case of the Anglican these
defects are vital and radical, since they are flaws
in what ought to be divinely intact — flaws, that
is to say, in such things as the certitude of faith,
the unity of believers, and the authority of those
who should be teachers in the Name of God; and
that in the case of the Catholic Church the flaws

152 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

are merely those of flawed humanity, inseparable
from the state of imperfection in which all men are
placed. The flaws of Anglicanism, and indeed in
Protestantism generally, are evidences that the
system is not divine; the flaws in the Catholic
system show no more than that it has a human side
as well as a divine, and this no Catholic has ever
dreamed of denying.

§ 3. In Rome I learned one supremely large
lesson, among a hundred others. It has been very
well said that Gothic architecture represents the
soul aspiring to God, and that Renaissance or
Romanesque architecture represents God taberna
cling with men. Both sides are true, yet neither, in
the religion of the Incarnation, is complete without
the other. On the one side, it is true that the soul
must always be seeking, always gazing up through
the darkness to a God who hides Himself, always
remembering that the Infinite transcends the finite
and that an immense agnosticism must be an ele
ment in every creed; the lines of this world, as it
were, run up into gloom; the light that glimmers
through carved tracery and heavy stains is enough
to walk by, but little more. It is in silence that
God is known, and through mysteries that He
declares Himself. "God is a spirit," formless,

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 153

infinite, invisible, and eternal, and "they that wor
ship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth."
Here, then, is mysticism and the darkness of spirit
ual experience.

Then, on the other side, God became man — "the
Word was made flesh." The divine, unknowable
Nature struck itself into flesh and "tabernacled
amongst us, and we beheld His glory." What was
hidden was made known. It is not only we who
thirst and knock: it is God Who, thirsting for our
love, died upon the cross that He might open the
kingdom of heaven to all believers, Who rent the
veil of the Temple by His death-groan, and Who
still stands knocking at every human heart, that
He may come in and sup with man. The round
dome of heaven is brought down to earth; the walls
of the world are plain to the sight; its limitations
are seen in the light of God; the broad sunshine
of Revelation streams on all sides through clear
windows upon a gorgeous pavement; angels and
gods and men riot together in an intoxication of
divine love; the high altar stands plain to view in a
blaze of gilding and candles; and above it the round
brazen and silken tent of God-made-man stands
that all alike may see and adore.

Now, this side of the religion of the Incarnation

154 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

had hitherto meant almost nothing to me. I was
a Northerner pure and simple, educated in Northern
ways. I loved twilight and mysterious music and
the shadow of deep woods; I hated open spaces of
sun and trumpets in unison and the round and
square in architecture. I preferred meditation to
vocal prayer, Mme. Guyon to Mother Julian, "John
Inglesant" to St. Thomas, the thirteenth century —
as I imagined it — to the sixteenth. Until towards
the end of my Anglican life I should frankly have
acknowledged this; then I should have resented the
accusation, for I was beginning to understand —
and, therefore, thought that I entirely understood
— that the world was as material as it was spiritual,
and that creeds were as necessary as aspirations.
But when I came to Rome I acknowledged to myself
once more how little I had understood.

Here was this city, Renaissance from end to end,
set under clear skies and a burning sun; and the
religion in it was the soul dwelling in the body. It
was the assertion of the reality of the human prin
ciple as embodying the divine. Even the exclusive
tenets of Christianity were expressed under pagan
images. Revelation spoke through forms of natural
religion; God dwelt unashamed in the light of day;
priests were priests, not aspiring clergymen; they

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 155

sacrificed, sprinkled lustral water, went in long,
rolling processions with incense and lights, and
called heaven Olympus. Sacrum Divo Sebastiano,
I saw inscribed on a granite altar. I sat under
priest-professors who shouted, laughed, and joyously
demonstrated before six nations in one lecture room.
I saw the picture of the "Father of princes and
kings and Lord of the world" exposed in the streets
on his name-day, surrounded by flowers and oil
lamps, in the manner in which, two centuries ago,
other lords of the world were honoured. I went
down into the Catacombs on St. Cecilia's Day and
St. Valentine's, and smelled the box and the myrtle
underfoot that did reverence to the fragrance of
their memories, as centuries ago they had done
reverence to victors in another kind of contest. In
one sentence, I began to understand that "the
Word was made flesh and dwelt among us"; that
as He took the created substance of a Virgin to
fashion for Himself a natural body, so still He
takes the created substance of men — their thoughts,
their expressions, and their methods — to make
for Himself that mystical body by which He is with
us always; in short, I perceived that "there is
nothing secular but sin." Catholicism, then, is
"materialistic?" Certainly; it is as materialistic

156 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

as the Creation and the Incarnation, neither more
nor less.

It is impossible to describe what this discovery
means to a Northern soul. Certainly it means the
obscuring of some of the old lights that had once
seemed so beautiful in the half-gloom of individual
experience, or rather, their drowning in the strong
sunshine. Set beside some Roman pomp an ex
quisite Anglican service: how provincial, domestic,
and individualistic becomes the latter! Set beside
a Gregorian professor lecturing to Greeks, Rouma
nians, and Frenchmen, on the principles of restitu
tion or the duty of citizens to the State, an Anglican
divine expounding St. Paul's Epistles to theological
students; a friar in S. Carlo beside the most passion
ate mission preacher in the Church of England;
the olive-laden peasants shouting hymns in S.
Giovanne in Laterano beside a devout company
of Anglicans gathered for Evensong; an hieratic
sacrificer in S. Maria Maggiore beside the most
perfectly drilled Ritualist in Mass vestments!
Oh! Set any section of Catholic faith and worship
seen in holy Rome beside the corresponding section
of Anglican faith and worship! Yet Anglicans are
shocked in Rome, and Dissenters exclaim at the
paganism, and Free-thinkers smile at the narrow-

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 157

ness of it all. Of course they are shocked and
exclaim and smile. How should they not?

Thus, in truth, a sojourn in Rome means an
expansion of view that is beyond words. Whereas
up to that time I had been accustomed to image
Christianity to myself as a delicate flower, divine
because of its supernatural fragility, now I saw that
it was a tree in whose branches the fowls of the air,
once the enemies of its tender growth, can lodge in
security — divine since the wideness of its reach
and the strength of its mighty roots can be accounted
for by nothing else. Before I had thought of it as
of a fine, sweet aroma, to be appreciated apart; now
I saw that it was the leaven, hid in the heavy meas
ures of the world, expressing itself in terms incalcu
lably coarser than itself, until the whole is leavened.

§ 4. So day after day the teaching went on. I
was as a boy introduced for the first time to some
great engine shed: the wheels roared round me;
huge, remorseless movements went on; the noise
and the power were bewildering; yet little by little
the lesson was dinned into my head that here w^as
something other than I had ever known, some
thing I could never have learned in my quiet
Northern twilight. Here were the business-offices
of the spiritual world; here grace was dispensed,

IS8 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

».

dogma defined, and provision made for souls across
the world. Here God had taken His seat to rule
His people, where once Domitian — Dominus et
Deus nosier — God's Ape, had ruled in His despite,
yet shadowing God's Vicar. On Good Friday,
below the ruins of the Palatine, I stood in "S.
TotoV church and heard, "If thou let this Man go,
thou art not Caesar's friend." Now "This Man" is
King and Caesar is nothing. Here, indeed, if ever
anywhere, has the leaven, plunged nineteen cen
turies ago by God's hand into the heaving sodden-
ness of the Empire of Rome, gradually expressed
itself in law and dogma under images of secular
thought; here was the blood of Peter, that soaked
into the ground below the obelisk, pulsing once
more in the veins of Pius — Pontifex Maximus et
Pater Patrum — scarcely a hundred yards away.

That at least I learned in Rome, and it was a
lesson worth the conflict ten thousand times over.
I had come out from a warm firelit room, full of
shadows, into the shouting wind and great air
spaces of human history. I understood at last that
nothing human was alien to God, that the gropings
of pre-Christian nations had brought them very
near to the Gate of Truth; that their little systems
and efforts and images had not been despised by

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 159

Him who permitted them; and that "God, having
spoken on divers occasions, and many ways, in
times past, to the fathers by the prophets, last of
all in these days hath spoken to us by His Son,
Whom He hath appointed heir of all things, by
Whom also He made the world; Who, being the
splendour of His glory and the figure of His sub
stance, and upholding all things by the word of
His power, making purgation of sins, sitteth on the
right Hand of the Majesty on high."

§ 5. And if I learned that in Rome, I have learned
once more in England that the Church of God is
as tender as she is strong. She, like her Spouse
and her type, His Mother, views all things, sees all
men, controls giant forces; yet in her divinity does
not despise "one of these little ones." To the world
she is a Queen, rigid, arrogant, and imperious, robed
in stiff gold and jewels, looking superbly out upon
crime and revolt; but to her own children she is
Mother even more than Queen. She fingers the
hurts of her tiniest sons, listens to their infinitesi
mal sorrows, teaches them patiently their lessons,
desires passionately that they should grow up as
princes should. And, supremely above all, she
knows how to speak to them of their Father and
Lord, how to interpret His will to them, how to

160 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

tell them the story of His exploits; she breathes
into them something of her own love and reverence;
she encourages them to be open and unafraid with
both her and Him; she takes them apart by a secret
way to introduce them to His presence.

All that I ever found in my old home, of guidance
and rebuke and encouragement, I have found again
at the hands of her priests, endowed, too, with
knowledge as well as love. All the freedom of
individual worship and thought that some think
to be the glory of non-Catholic bodies I have found
expressly secured to me in her temples, and have
used it with far more confidence, since I know that
her searching eye is upon me and that she will first
call and at last strike swiftly if I wander too far.
Her arms are as open to those who would serve God
in silence and seclusion as to those who "dance
before Him with all their might.'7 For, like Charity,
of which she is the embodiment, she is patient, she
is kind; . . . she beareth all things, believe th all
things, hopeth all things, endureth all things; she
never faileth. In her "we know in part, and we
prophesy in part"; we are secure of what we have
received, we are expectant of that which is yet to
come. No one better than she recognizes that
"we see now through a glass in an obscure manner,"

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 161

yet some day "face to face"; that now we "know
in part, but then we shall know even as we are
known." In her supremely I understand that
"when I was a child I spoke as a child, I under
stood as a child, I thought as a child. But when I
became a man, I put away the things of a child."

All, then, that is to be found in every other system,
however eclectic, however adapted to the individual,
is to be found here — all the mysticism of the
North, the patience of the East, the joyful confi
dence of the South, and the fearless enterprise of
the West. She understands and kindles the heart
as well as she guides and informs the head. She
alone holds up virginity as the most honourable
state and matrimony as an indissoluble and holy
Sacrament. She alone recognizes explicitly the
vocation of the individual as perfectly as the ideals
of the race; is reverent towards subjective faith as
well as faithful to objective truth. She alone, in
fact, is perfectly familiar and tender with the separate
soul, understands its wants, supplies its deficiencies,
deals carefully with its weaknesses and sins; simply
because she is as wide as the world, as old as the
ages, and as great-hearted as God.

§ 6. As, then, I look back from this present
moment, reading again the first page of these Con-

162 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

fessions and sitting here in the house which once
I visited years ago as a suspicious, timid, complacent
boy, I see God's plan with me lying like a golden
thread through all the tumbled country through
which I have come, up from the pleasant meadows
of home and school, the broken slopes of minis
terial work, the caverns and cliffs of the shadow
of death, up to this walled and battlemented
plateau, from which for the first time the world
is visible as it really is, not as I had thought
it to be. I understand now that there is cohe
rence in all that God has made — that He has
made of one blood all the nations of the earth;
that there is not one aspiration out of the dark
ness that does not find its way to Him; not one
broken or distorted system of thought that does
not flash back at least one ray of eternal glory; not
one soul but has her place in His economy. On
the one side there is thirst and desire and restless
ness; on the other, satisfaction and peace; there
is no instinct but has its object, no pool but it reflects
the sun, no spot of disfigured earth but has the sky
above it. And through all this ruined wilderness
He has brought me, of His infinite goodness, to that
place where Jerusalem has descended from on high,
which is the mother of us all; He has brought me

CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT 163

out of the mire and clay and set my feet upon the
rock; He has lifted me from those straying paths
that lead nowhere, on to the broad road that leads
to Him.

What yet lies beyond I do not know: the towers
of this City of God rise immediately into the clouds
that are about His Throne; the City is too vast,
its streets too glorious, its houses too stupendous
for any soul to dream that she knows them all or
understands their secret. In this world, at least,
not even the saint or the theologian, or the old man
who has lived all his days within her walls, can dare
to think that he has advanced more than a few
steps within her heavenly gates. He stands within
her, and, thank God, I stand there with him, as does
every soul to whom God has shown this great mercy.
But all of us together are but a party of children
wandering in from the country, travel-stained, tired,
and bewildered with glory. About us are the great
palaces, where the princes dwell; behind us that
gate of pearl which, somehow, we have passed;
the streets before us are crowded with heavenly
forms too bright to look upon; and supremely
high above us rises that great curtained stair
way that leads to the King.

It is there that we must go presently, after a few

164 CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT

more steps across the market square. Yet there
is nothing to fear for those who stand where we
stand; there are no precipices to be climbed any
more and no torrents to be crossed; God has made
all easy for those He has admitted through the
Gate of Heaven that He has built upon the earth;
the very River of Death itself is no more than a
dwindled stream, bridged and protected on every
side; the shadow of death is little more than twi
light for those who look on it in the light of the
Lamb.

"Behold, the tabernacle of God with men; and
He will dwell with them. . . . and God shall wipe
away all tears from their eyes, and death shall be
no more . . . And the City needeth not sun or moon
to shine in it; for the glory of God hath enlight
ened it, and the Lamb is the lamp thereof."

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON &* Co.
at Paul's Work, Edinburgh

BX 4705 .B2765 A5 1913

SMC

Benson, Robert Hugh,

1871-1914.
Confessions of a convert

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AJY-9068 (rncab)